[nrdvana]

I'd say Delphi was one notch better than Visual Studio. The pascal language was more highly optimized and easier to parse, so the debugger was much snappier about popping up the tooltips to show you values of variables or F1 to jump into the help pages. I remember being especially disappointed with VS because they would spend hundreds of MB of your precious disk space installing the entire Microsoft Knowledge Base, and the hitting F1 on a code statement would bring up a mishmash of Visual Basic examples (while developing C++) for almost but not the right class. In Delphi, it always knew exactly what class you were dealing with and would open the correct help page before your finger was fully off of the function key. The help pages had been expertly written to show you the most important details first, and were easy to browse. Really, I'm surprised I don't see more people reminiscing about those help files. There was probably as much effort put into that as into the frameworks or compiler or IDE.

[Reitet00]

Agreed. The help pages were really top notch. Other software's help pages were basically useless to the point that no one read them. In Delphi not only you had to the point explanations but also examples that frequently solved the problem one had in the first place. Sadly, as someone pointed out, most of this art seems to be forgotten with time.

[CRConrad]

You could say the only fault with those help pages is that they were too good: Some time after v. 5 they stopped including those lovely paper manuals, probably because they figured the help pages were good enough to replace them.