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0 pointsstareatgoats8y ago0 comments

Mmm... Ashton-Tate dBase III+, those were the good old days:) And later, similarly with db and programming integration: MS Access, and even Excel to some extent.

None of them ever made it past the 'desktop' as a whole though, probably a feature of any db-included programming language.

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Roboprog8y ago· 1 in thread

I did quite a bit of dBase/Clipper back in the late 80s.

The resulting code was much cleaner than most of the “enterprise” crap I have to deal with now, but xBase had some serious shortcomings:

Corrupted indices in a multi-user (LAN) environment

No roll-back (since no transactions)

No referential integrity constraints

Yeah, I sometimes miss it, but I understand why it died.

stareatgoatsOP8y ago

I hear you. Yea, I never got round to using Clipper but was on track, especially the possibility to create standalone applications as front-end clients in a client/server setup was interesting. It was bought and botched by CA before I got round to it though, at least it looked like CA mishandled it from what I could see.

A fun related fact albeit OT was that those DOS applications were orders or magnitude faster to keyboard operate than the GUI applications that came after ... I'm sure some of them are still in use for that reason.

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