Re: Mildly OT: dBASE IV

"Frank Hamersley" <terabitemightbe_at_bigpond.com> wrote in message news:JzCeg.13205$S7.11478_at_news-server.bigpond.net.au...
> 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.

>

>

>

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. Received on Mon May 29 2006 - 16:31:38 CEST