[mickeyp]

Delphi had amazing data binding. You literally dropped two non-visual components on your form; plonked down data-aware components; and then pointed it at any number of databases via ADO, DAO, ODBC or BDE and you were flying.

Unrivalled flexibility and power and you could do knock together a CRUD app in a couple of hours.

Add to that the incredible flexibility afforded by 3rd party components like DevExpress and you had grids and other tabular components that even today any amount of HTML5, JS and CSS and backend programming could only dream of achieving.

And we did this in the 90s.

[warfangle]

How was it at near-platform-universality and secure HTTP transmission?

[jacques_chester]

Windows was the near-universal platform and fairly sophisticated networking ability was inbuilt.

[coldtea]

You mean getting something else (that's orthogonal) in exchange, justifies a regression to pre-90's in other areas?

[mickeyp]

Plus it was trivial to make n-tier architectures. Tying it to the web was quite easy too, and there were components out there that made data interchange via HTTP trivial - like SOAP.