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Paco Delacroix's avatar

"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"

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Another Boring Topic's avatar

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.

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Scott Ocamb's avatar

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!

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Another Boring Topic's avatar

Glad you enjoyed it!

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Zack Urlocker's avatar

Thank you for a great article. I wasn't on the dBase for Windows team, but I was part of Delphi and we were down the hall from them. But from what I could tell there were sort of 2 1/2 different internal efforts to build dBase for Windows. There was the code Borland acquired from Ashton Tate. Possibly Gregor Freund worked on trying to get that code in shape or maybe he was building his own thing. But none of it was converrging. (Gregor eventually left to create a new startup ZoneLabs.)

Bill Turpin was the VP of Engineering at the time and I believe he got the project back on track by acquiring WordTech which brought in Randy Solton, Mike Gardner, Liz Stevenson. Lloyd Tabb also worked on it. Bill and Lloyd left later after dBase for Windows shipped to join Netscape. It was a good team, but there was a lot of pressure on them.

To be clear, they shipped the WordTech based version; the earlier efforts were scrapped.

dBase for Windows sales never lived up to expectations. My belief is that most dBase developers either got out of the business with the transition to Windows or moved on to other products like Access, FoxPro, VB etc.

Delphi shipped in February 1995 and generated about $110m in first year revenues (adjusted for inflation) and that pretty much saved the company at least for a few years.

Chapman's book is a fun read, but he can be a bit mean spirited some times. Still, I think most people view the acquisition of Ashton-Tate as the beginning of the end of Borland. Borland wasn't the only company to get caught flat-footed in the migration towards Windows. Possibly the history would have been different if Borland had acquired FoxPro instead.

Thanks for the article.

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Glen's avatar

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

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Delphi Critic's avatar

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.

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