Historical survey of Borsuk's contribution to ordinary shape theory, including the achievements of other people in this field. Ordinary shape is some kind of Čech homotopy theory whose relationship to Čech homology is the same as that of ordinary homotopy theory to singular homology. Reviewer's remark: The discovery that (stably) there exists such a kind of homotopy theory, goes back to E. Lima about ten years before Borsuk introduced explicitly his concept of a morphism, which he called shape mapping.