Re: Mildly OT: dBASE IV

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.

-- 
Kenneth Downs
Secure Data Software, Inc.
(Ken)nneth_at_(Sec)ure(Dat)a(.com)