Re: Mildly OT: dBASE IV

Kenneth Downs wrote:
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 called
"dBase II". (I was later to find out there never was a dbase I). It was
up there with another intimidating $600.00 box labeled "Lotus 123".

A few years later I made the same basic discovery that those countless other
consultants made. Being unschooled in any kind of relational theory, if in
fact 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, the
shops that had built their fortunes on it were already breaking up. They
can blame Ashton-Tate if they want, but I took more than one job from them
and 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 already
the dinosaur. Foxpro was the bees knees. When C/S came along fox morphed
beautifully and went along. I elected not to use it for 3-tier because for
one 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 and
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.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Mildly OT: dBASE IV
    ... "25 Worst Tech Tech Products of All Time." ... I was interested to see item #5: dBASE IV. ... That product by the way was Foxpro. ... My generation of consultants would never have touched dbase, ...
    (comp.databases.theory)
  • Re: Mildly OT: dBASE IV
    ... I was interested to see item #5: dBASE IV. ... That product by the way was Foxpro. ... I had been programming for some 20 years, as a student, in on campus summer ... released internal copies of DEC Rdb. ...
    (comp.databases.theory)
  • Re: Novice ODBC Remote Views access Goldmine (dBase) tables
    ... Opening a dBase file directly from Foxpro can be hazardous. ... unreadable by dBase (or in this case, Goldmine). ... > That connection string seems to use the ODBC driver 'dBase Files'. ...
    (microsoft.public.fox.programmer.exchange)
  • Re: Connect to dBase V files with ODBC?
    ... I don't have direct experience with dBase but in FoxPro tables deleted rows ... and then can issue the Pack command. ...
    (microsoft.public.data.odbc)
  • Re: Mildly OT: dBASE IV
    ... I ended up using Foxpro on SCO for an app that lasted for 15 years ... My epiphany re databases was seeing dbase II on a mates Osbourne in Adelaide round about 1980 or 81 as I recall. ... Thereafter I did a major Clipper and a few minor Clipper projects before moving to Access and then consulting SQL Server and Sybase ASE. ... released internal copies of DEC Rdb. ...
    (comp.databases.theory)
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