Re: Mildly OT: dBASE IV
- From: "David Cressey" <dcressey@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 29 May 2006 14:31:38 GMT
"Frank Hamersley" <terabitemightbe@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:JzCeg.13205$S7.11478@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Kenneth Downs wrote:called
Marshall wrote:
I randomly surfed my way to a PC World article on the
"25 Worst Tech Tech Products of All Time." It was actually
better done than those sorts of things usually are.
I was interested to see item #5: dBASE IV.
http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,125772,pg,3,00.asp#dbase
Roughly, the blurb claims the company went from market leader
to nowheresville on the "strength" of this single release.
I vaguely remember Ashton-Tate as a once-was tech giant.
Anyone have any stories about this they'd care to share?
When I was sixteen there was a huge shrink-wrapped box on the shelf
was"dBase II". (I was later to find out there never was a dbase I). It
otherup there with another intimidating $600.00 box labeled "Lotus 123".
A few years later I made the same basic discovery that those countless
inconsultants made. Being unschooled in any kind of relational theory, if
thefact we had any formal computer education at all, and with backgrounds
ranging from Physics to History, we recognized a product with immense
intuitive appeal. We saw that we could grind out apps fast that people
would pay good money for.
That product by the way was Foxpro. By the time dbase IV came around,
Theyshops that had built their fortunes on it were already breaking up.
themcan blame Ashton-Tate if they want, but I took more than one job from
alreadyand from I could tell they all thought they were IBM. They were fat,
arrogant, uncompromising, and disappearing.
My generation of consultants would never have touched dbase, it was
morphedthe dinosaur. Foxpro was the bees knees. When C/S came along fox
forbeautifully and went along. I elected not to use it for 3-tier because
andone it was too much of a stretch of its original intent, and for two
Microsoft doesn't want me to use it on Linux, so I granted their wish
don't use their products at all anymore.
My poison was Clipper Summer 87 and then 5.01 from Nantucket (the 2 gold
releases). When Foxpro came out it was seen more as a clone of the
dBase user environment while Clipper was a *woo hoo* compiler (well sort
of)! I ended up using Foxpro on SCO for an app that lasted for 15 years
before it was retired. It was fast and quite reliable.
When M$ bought FoxPro and Nantucket went off with VO - soon followed by
CA slurping Nantucket up, the future was writ large on the wall.
About then I suspended my coding activities and became a dreaded
consultant and then even worse, a project manager!
Cheers, Frank.
Frank,
Your CV makes interesting reading.
My trajectory was somewhat different.
I had been programming for some 20 years, as a student, in on campus summer
jobs, or as a professional, when I got exposed to the data centric world
view. It changed my thinking.
During my 20 as a programmer, I had learned along the way, such things as
interactive debugging (using a tool called DDT on the PDP-1 in 1962-63),
structured programming (largely self taught, although I did eventually
read some books on the subject), and languages ranging from assembler to
lisp to Algol and Pascal.
My switchover to data centric thinking was occasioned by a confluence of
factors: a change of jobs, where my mission was to support a boss that was
interested in using data for decision making, rather than in technology for
its own sake. A change of mentors: a colleague of mine, a database
instructor named Bob Ellis, exposed me to the relational model, albeit in
very low level form. A change of platform, from the DECsystem-10 where I
knew the operating system internals, to the VAX, where I didn't even know
the command language. And a change from 3GLs to Datatrieve, a funny little
language that allowed you to do remarkably sophisticated things with data
without engaging in a lot of esoteric programming.
By the time Datatrieve's limitations got to be too much for me, DEC had
released internal copies of DEC Rdb. DEC Rdb comprised Rdb/VMS, which got
sold to Oracle in 1994. It also comprised Rdb/ELN, which was actually
available internally before Rdb/VMS. Rdb/ELN eventually stimulated the
building of Interbase... Firebird.
I never got involved in Foxpro or Clipper or DBASE, except as a hobby.
Eventually, I started using MS Access for some data management tasks that
were NOT part of my deliverables, just because it was so easy and so
ubiquitous.
For me, even Oracle RDBMS was a step down from DEC Rdb, as a DBMS.
However, as a programming environment, Oracle was a step up from Rdb.
For the next 15 years or so, I spent helping people with Rdb and/or Oracle
databases get more bang for the buck. Perhaps that's why my experience is
so contrary to what Dawn recounts.
.
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