Same here. It was an era where the company I worked for was looking to transition to web. The web was NOWHERE near ready for a desktop-app like experience. Especially since the RAD crowd (VB, Delphi, etc) expected to drag and drop components on a canvas and wire them up in code. We saw that as the holy grail. Delphi apps were promoting a "briefcase model" client/server architecture. And we were sort leveraging that for salespeople in the field. They'd go out, do their work, and then get online to sync data when they could. The idea that they could just hit a web page and do up to the minute transactions over a dial-up internet connection was the new "holy grail".

Moving to the web meant Perl:DBI, then Python/MySQL, then finally PHP4.

I'll always have such a soft spot for those Delphi days though. Kylix too!