The pascal language requires things to be declared in a certain order. It's a bit awkward some of the time bit it enables the compiler to work in a single pass. This meant that running an application was extremely fast by any standards and this really made it stand out compared to other development tools out there.

VB created applications that had to ship with a shared runtime library. Windows wasn't great at versioning these libraries so developers often shipped their own VB runtime with their executable. The executable was small and the runtime was comparatively huge which had a negative impact on user perception when downloading the installers.

Before moving on to Microsoft in 1996, Anders Heilsberg was the Chief Engineer at Borland that oversaw the development and release of Delphi 1.0.

For years, VB felt like an application that could make deployable versions of itself. Delphi felt like a programming environment that compiled code into applications.

After Heilsberg moved to MS, a lot of improvements were made in VB that utlimately made Delphi less attractive, especially during Borland's strategic waffling known as "The Inprise Years": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland#Inprise_Corporation_Er...

If you want to get a feel for what it was like then check out the FOSS clone "Lazarus".