Delphi was far superior than all other languages of the time, it had all the necessary bullet points to become what is Java now.
Borland really failed on the marketing and sales side, while providing the best tech, they completely missed the importance of having a strong sales team capable of scaling the language inside corporates, which were the driving force back in the days.
I have a lot of good memories of Borland Delphi 4.0 and 5.0 on Windows 95 and later 98/2000.