"I've had the privilege of working in Tech Support for dBASE III Plus and navigating the challenges of dBASE IV during my time at Ashton-Tate's Argentina Subsidiary. It was an experience I truly enjoyed. Thank you for this article; it brought back nice memories"
Thank you for the compliment, I'm so glad you enjoyed it! I had an enormous amount of fun researching and writing this, dBase truly was a seminal product and it's neat that it's still around today.
Thanks so much for this. I was a programmer while all of these events unfolded. I was a Clipper developer for a good number of years. That is a rabbit hole in and of itself. As a side note, I used Desqview as part of my development environment, another rabbit hole.
As a British council scholarship holder in Bristol UK my major focus was learning duplex scanning of carotid arteries - my secondary task was to establish a micro computer based vascular surgical audit. My only experience at the time was using a Wang word processor and Basic - spreadsheet.
On return to Adelaide in 1986 I set up the data base at the Royal Adelaide hospital.
By 2018 over 25000 operations had been entered. By then the computer gurus had converted the DBase data to Microsoft Access which claimed to be a relational data base but one full of tables.
One of my former customers was a victim of Ashton-Tate's lawyers. They forced them to buy extra licenses for each computer they had, whether or not dBase IV or it's run-time was installed or not.
"I've had the privilege of working in Tech Support for dBASE III Plus and navigating the challenges of dBASE IV during my time at Ashton-Tate's Argentina Subsidiary. It was an experience I truly enjoyed. Thank you for this article; it brought back nice memories"
Thank you for the compliment, I'm so glad you enjoyed it! I had an enormous amount of fun researching and writing this, dBase truly was a seminal product and it's neat that it's still around today.
Thanks so much for this. I was a programmer while all of these events unfolded. I was a Clipper developer for a good number of years. That is a rabbit hole in and of itself. As a side note, I used Desqview as part of my development environment, another rabbit hole.
Thanks Again for the trip down memory lane!
Glad you enjoyed it!
As a British council scholarship holder in Bristol UK my major focus was learning duplex scanning of carotid arteries - my secondary task was to establish a micro computer based vascular surgical audit. My only experience at the time was using a Wang word processor and Basic - spreadsheet.
On return to Adelaide in 1986 I set up the data base at the Royal Adelaide hospital.
By 2018 over 25000 operations had been entered. By then the computer gurus had converted the DBase data to Microsoft Access which claimed to be a relational data base but one full of tables.
I obtained a copy and converted back to DBase
happy to discuss further
gleneben@bigpond.net .au
I blogged about the latest dBase BDE issues.
https://delphinightmares.substack.com/p/dbase-2019-optimized-edition-achilles
One of my former customers was a victim of Ashton-Tate's lawyers. They forced them to buy extra licenses for each computer they had, whether or not dBase IV or it's run-time was installed or not.