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Associate: form. Buy it Now! Share 0. Tweet 0. Some of you are old enough to remember a time when the main word processor, spreadsheet and personal database programs were NOT Word, Excel and Access. If you think Windows 8 was a screw-up, well, that was nothing.
At least Windows 8 works. Microsoft introduced Access and Borland had its own database, called Paradox, which caused conflict within Borland between the two teams.
Give dBase the company credit for keeping up with the times and including support for a lot of Microsoft database technology. It can be used to build a variety of applications, including Web applications running on IIS or Apache, and or bit Windows client applications, along with middleware and server-based applications running on Windows Server I was super excited about the SQL support in dBase IV - until after an entire evening of trying to get it to work I realized they had shipped non-functional code.
Not buggy - it just didn't actually work as documented. Ended the company. They came up with massive patches years later - but it was too late - people had moved on. I would love to read a story on how they decided to ship a product that was essentially still months from being completed.
I'm guessing? Which felt like a lot of money back then. This book is mandatory reading. In college I traded a gym membership for foxbase programming. I sometimes wonder that we haven't progressed much at all from those days.
It made for some interesting programing and data display. Dbase IV biggest issue was that it supported the SQL syntax for the first time and it's implementation was just buggy and FoxPro just worked better. Jemm 8 months ago parent prev next [—]. It had a bad habit of corrupting the database often requiring a rebuild.
Not a big deal but a bit of a productivity killer. Zenst 8 months ago prev next [—]. Fun times and all in an era without raid storage, though the likes of Novell Netware soon did well addressing that in the years that followed.
Which was pretty powerful stuff and was used for bespoke construction projects - what would be the realm of ERP in many ways. But large projects like the construction of oil-rigs was not isolated and few large engineering projects would be using your DBase, Dataease and Paradox! Was not long after that we saw SQL start to take some traction in usage and availability.
For rapid development of databases, with forms and reporting, nothing current beats it for speed and flexibility if you have the familiarity of course. Borlands database was Paradox not dbase. They lasted into the Windows era. Also see the open source harbour which round on unix. Borland bought Aston-Tate in , and thereafter owned dBase.
Borland also developed Paradox prior to that acquisition. Clipper and FoxBase were dBase clones, and not always compatible. I did a lot of Clipper programming in the 90s, and a lot of reporting in MS Access. And let's not forget Btrieve. Prior to my Clipper work, I did a lot of work building an estimation and accounting system based on Btrieve databases, using an obscure system called TAS Professional. We used it under DOS for our backoffice system - you talked to the "database" engine using an interrupt via loaded as a TSR utility.
I know of at least one government contractor that was still shipping a clipper application at least until It is amazing the software that is foisted on government grantees. Borland bought Paradox was developed by Ansana??? I don't remember this history -- Borland bought Ansa Paradox in Microsoft had no desktop database product then. It bought FoxPro in and Access was released in Lotus also had no desktop database product then.
Lotus bought Approach in Recall their Sprint word processor and Quattro Pro , part of their demise was stepping out of the niche compiler market into more mainstream office market. Borland had very little except "me too" products, TBH. Of all the Borland products, this one had the longest shelf-life, now still actively developed by Embarcadero. I really don't agree and I don't think creating a product in the same category is "me-too".
Borland had some truly great products back in the day. Quattro Pro had innovations that surpassed the incumbent 's. Paradox had innovations that superseded dBASE. In the s and early 90s, the marketplace was full of competing office products before Microsoft Office came around and dominated then scene folks might remember Lotus SmartSuite and Corel WordPerfect Office. Spreadsheets weren't always synonymous Excel, nor word processors with Word. Dude, I used to use Visicalc. Which should help you understand my perspective better.
EricE 8 months ago root parent prev next [—]. I recently came across my old Clarion disks. Harbour is really interesting and, last time I saw it some years ago, its development was pretty active.
I have already messed around a bit with Harbour and even wrote some small tools for personal use. I was pretty happy with the combination of modern capabilities with the old-school "TUI ergonomics", allowing one to render a TUI to a Win32 GDI context they give a name to that capability, which I can't recall.
It seems that there is also the possibility of rendering to X11 windows, if I'm not mistaken. I know a couple of decades-old Clipper shops which continued their development with Harbour although they migrated from DBF files to relational databases , and their businesses are doing fairly well. Borland acquired Paradox from Ansa. Having two flagship database products unfortunately led to a confused strategy and neither product thrived after the acquisition. CurtHagenlocher 8 months ago parent prev next [—].
In the end Borland acquired what was left of Aston Tate, so I guess it's fair to call it Borland now. Something that popped into my head the other day, is that I think we missed a trick going straight from text based UIs with their uniform simplicity to rich, pixel-perfect GUIs. Would be interesting to see a design system that somehow sits in-between these two extremes. I've got no idea what that looks like.
I experimented with building something like that at the time as a potential graphical BBS interface with low bandwidth requirements. I agree completely, and I'm actively working on this. There have been many advances in "text-based UIs" and the modern TUI can have both the uniform simplicity you speak of, along with a rich, mouseable, colorful, unicode interface.
Not quite. What I envision is something that has a broader colour palette, say colours. And for contiguous blocks some basic capability to support proportional width text. Same with ability to fill blocks with images. I may have already gone too far with the proportional text.
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