[HN Gopher] Exploring Borland DBase IV for DOS (2020)
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Exploring Borland DBase IV for DOS (2020)
Author : elvis70
Score : 36 points
Date : 2021-03-04 15:06 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (psychocod3r.wordpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (psychocod3r.wordpress.com)
| Zenst wrote:
| 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.
|
| I didn't do much DBase work in that time, but did do Dataease
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DataEase (if you get an old copy
| hold down the CTRL key and type DEBUG and you will get a hidden
| debug mode, might also need to hold shift and do not recall if
| debug was upper or lower case but one or the other will work in
| the old DOS versions at least).
|
| 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! as well as few that I do not
| recall at the moment.
|
| Was not long after that we saw SQL start to take some traction in
| usage and availability. Which was also around the time that the
| GUI war (however brief the GEM/Windows and then Windows/ OS/2
| was) and saw many of those legacy databases fall upon those
| swords over the comming decade and early 90's release of Access
| sure did cat those who was left, combined with some aggressive
| office bundles and that included later their server system with
| backoffice - all priced together for the price of a competitions
| single package offering and that further hammered many of the
| competition that come the end of the 90's - many just hang on to
| stalwart legacy customers and for some, that help for a while.
| kcartlidge wrote:
| I still use DataEase v4 for DOS (no interest in the Windows
| versions). For rapid development of databases, with forms and
| reporting, nothing current beats it for speed and flexibility
| (if you have the familiarity of course).
| tyingq wrote:
| That progressions of screens is remarkably similar to what you
| see today with things like Quickbase, Zoho Creator, Knack.com,
| Ragic.com, etc.
| dspillett wrote:
| A lot of low-code solutions aimed at collecting and reporting
| on data are based on streamlined versions of the workflows from
| old-world DBs like this (and, later, Access): Define your data,
| define how it is joined for reports, drag-and-drop form/table
| designers of varying complexity for data entry. So the UI is
| likely to feel similar unless/until someone comes up with a
| genuinely new paradigm for this sort of thing. Some are a bit
| more spreadsheet+transformation based, but that is the "define
| data & connections" part and once you add custom forms for
| easier data entry you are essentially back to the same place
| just maybe hiding the table structure less.
| GnarfGnarf wrote:
| I was actually still using Sequiter CodeBase
| (dBase/FoxPro/Clipper) until last year, when I upgraded to 64-bit
| and couldn't compile the CodeBase source. There were 64-bit flags
| in the code, but it failed to work. Switched to SQLite, should
| have done years ago.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Brought back some good memories of my old days writing Clipper
| software. Performance was fast, I mean really fast, even on plain
| 486 PC hardware. I still have some sources around, although I
| made use of external libraries iirc for .nsx indexes and other
| things and they wouldn't compile with some free Clipper clones.
| airhead969 wrote:
| Interesting. Maybe take a look at R:BASE too. It was the first
| relational database for the PC. dBASE wasn't very relational
| (didn't emphasize referential integrity) at first. MicroRIM also
| took/takes pride in its code.
| teilo wrote:
| I entirely forgot about R:BASE. Thanks for the memories. I
| worked in it only briefly, as a teenager. My uncle, an early PC
| adopter, introduced me to it.
| ghaff wrote:
| Relational databases were pretty new at the time of dBase II,
| although at least IBM and Oracle had SQL-based products. There
| were a bunch of other databases in the market however.
| airhead969 wrote:
| IBM's System R came out in 1977, and DB/2 in 83.
|
| R:BASE was the first RDBMS on the PC. Oracle existed in 1979
| but was only ported to PC in 1984.
|
| NonStop SQL in 1987 was revolutionary.
| tyingq wrote:
| Foxbase/FoxPro and Clipper also.
| mamcx wrote:
| "referential integrity" is not necessary to make something
| relational.
|
| Is just that for some reasons, everyone on the RDBMS/relational
| space instantly add EVERYTHING that make a rdbms.
|
| Is like adding transactions to OO... and if a OO implementation
| don't have it claim is not OO.
|
| P.D: I'm building a relational language... And also start with
| FoxPro. What it not have at the time was well rounded SQL
| support but is until this day MUCH better rdbms tool than any
| other on the market, by a mile (considering the difference on
| time and scope, btw)
| airhead969 wrote:
| Never said that. And I'm having difficulty following what
| point you're trying to make because there's little coherence
| or grammar to your writing.
|
| Referential integrity is a real DBMS term, so I don't know
| why you're poo-pooing it. It means never having dangling
| foreign key references.
|
| The drop or preserve semantics of RI are dependent on R-E
| DBMS design (foreign keys). RI is fundamental to data
| hygiene, unless you'd prefer customers have a huge mess and
| then blame you for it.
|
| FoxPro is/was based on dBASE II/III. R:BASE predates it by 3
| years.
|
| Good luck to you!
| malkia wrote:
| Last year of mathematical high-school (Bulgaria, 1993-94) I had
| assignment for dBase. I hated it, but I was rebel back then :)
| lsllc wrote:
| Ah the good times when you could build a functioning business
| application in a day or two or three.
|
| Now it takes 2 weeks to evaluate the latest UI frameworks only to
| find the one you chose (or it's tooling) is obsolete before you
| finish the project:
|
| https://hackernoon.com/how-it-feels-to-learn-javascript-in-2...
| (from 2016).
| bborud wrote:
| I was thinking the same thing. In fact, I've been thinking
| along these lines for a while now. It would be cool if someone
| were to revisit the idea and re-create it in a modern form.
|
| Modern, but without all the nonsense we waste time on today.
| G3rn0ti wrote:
| I'd love to see it used as a DB backend for a small website. :-D
| nybblesio wrote:
| dBASE was a product of Ashton-Tate, not Borland. [1] Odd sidebar:
| Ashton-Tate had a BBS accessible via a toll-free (800) number for
| many years and it was extremely popular. I shudder at the thought
| of their monthly phone bill.
|
| I built several systems using dBASE III and Clipper. Ah, the
| Summer of 87. [2]
|
| I know I'm old and washed up when I wish I could time travel back
| to this era. I miss it.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashton-Tate
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_(programming_language)
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| When a program could be written and be useable within hours.
|
| Now it takes me days to install VM's and butchered/forked SDK's
| and cloud connectors and incant the various sacred undocumented
| mantras before I can actually open VSCode and start coding.
| bitwize wrote:
| Library terminals! I remember the public library in my hometown
| had both an InfoTrac PC (with CD-ROM, in the 80s!) with a
| horribly burned-in amber monitor, and actual green screen
| terminals connected to some beast in the basement or someplace
| (VAX?) to search the card catalog.
| bombcar wrote:
| I remember that half the searches at the main library would
| refer you to the microfiche (for some reason they'd know which
| one to look at but wouldn't have the data).
| ghshephard wrote:
| dBase IV tanked the dBase Line. dBase III+ was an amazing product
| - that everyone used, was super reliable - I made a ton[1] of
| money in college writing up, teaching dBase III+ systems (Along
| with with FoxBase PRO).
|
| When dBase IV came out (From Ashton Tate, Not Borland) it was
| buggy, and much of the stuff in the user manual literally did not
| work. 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 12-18 months from being
| completed. I 'm guessing (?) they were about to run out of cash -
| and selling something, even if it didn't work, kept the lights
| on? Hard to believe given how dominant dBase III+ was back then.
|
| [1] Where, by ton, I mean many, many hundreds of dollars. Which
| felt like a lot of money back then.
| toddh wrote:
| Loved FoxBase PRO. In college I traded a gym membership for
| foxbase programming. I sometimes wonder that we haven't
| progressed much at all from those days.
| protomyth wrote:
| First real job and all I had was Foxbase Pro, Turbo C 2.01,
| and a PostScript printer. It made for some interesting
| programing and data display.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| 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.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Neat, this was the first db I was exposed to at school and didn't
| touch another for years. Didn't know it could be so colorful, my
| memory is of grey on black. CP 437 FTW though.
|
| I thought the lang was a precursor of SQL, but people are saying
| that's not the case. Might explain why I also didn't know SQL for
| a long time.
| ghaff wrote:
| SQL dated back to work at IBM in the early 1970s but it didn't
| actually find its way into products from IBM and Oracle for
| almost another decade. I can't say to what degree any of that
| work influenced dBase. Certainly, the relational model wasn't
| dominant at the time.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I'm not sure I'd go with the green terminal feel. By the time
| dBase IV was released, VGA was becoming popular a lot of us moved
| to color monitors. Even the monochrome ones were white, thanks to
| the adoption of GUIs.
|
| Last green-screen I used was on a CGA system. It was horrendous.
| ghaff wrote:
| You really only wanted CGA when you _had_ to do something
| graphical. The nicest thing you could probably say was it was
| better than nothing. For most purposes, it was better to just
| use text monochrome. (There was monochrome graphics with
| Hercules and some other proprietary variants but they were
| never very widely supported.)
| rbanffy wrote:
| At least in Brazil, where I lived, CGA monitors were much
| cheaper because they had high commonality with B&W TVs, CCTV
| monitors, and the monitors that have been used with 8-bit
| computers. Color RGBi monitors were not as common because
| they required better CRTs than most TVs that size and decent
| color monitors only started appearing when it became easier
| to import them and their parts.
|
| I'm not really fond on the MDA/EGA/VGA default fonts either
| unless we are talking about the ones that came with the
| Cordata or Toshiba portables ;-)
| faichai wrote:
| 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.
| janekm wrote:
| I experimented with building something like that (at the time)
| as a potential graphical BBS interface with low bandwidth
| requirements. Basically combination of sprite editor / "level
| editor" to create graphical screens as a grid of entries into
| the sprite table, the sprite set & graphical screens required
| very little bandwidth.
| buescher wrote:
| Are you imagining something like the PLATO system?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system)
| faichai wrote:
| Not quite. What I envision is something that has a broader
| colour palette, say 256 colours. Themeable. Perhaps like
| subpixels, there's some kind of sub-character addressing mode
| to give more control aesthetics but not too much. 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.
| monkey_monkey wrote:
| I remember doing a project for my CS degree in DBase III, and in
| my first job out of university I built a back office system for a
| very large UK cinema chain in Clipper. Discovering Blinker was a
| game changer, and Mike Schinkel's "Programming in Clipper 5" was
| my bible.
|
| The nostalgia is real.
| jasim wrote:
| Blink and you'll miss it !!
|
| Oh the nostalgia. Linkers were exotic at the time. Before I
| discovered Blinker, I got to use Exospace that was shipped with
| Clipper 5.3. A lot of old goodies are still availabe at the The
| Oasis mirror at https://harbour.github.io/the-
| oasis/ftpgenrl.htm
| pasc1878 wrote:
| Borlands database was Paradox not dbase. Looks like borland was
| picking up the pieces of failing PCDOS companies A better history
| is on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBase
|
| For dbase look at Nantucket Clipper and Fox Base (which MS
| bought). They lasted into the Windows era. Also see the open
| source harbour which round on unix
| wenc wrote:
| Borland acquired Paradox from Ansa. They later acquired Ashton
| Tate which gave them dBASE.
|
| For those who have used both, many consider Paradox the
| superior product (technically and also in terms of ease of use,
| hence the name "paradox"). It had innovations like QBE and a
| modern Turbo Vision interface. The Paradox Application Language
| (PAL) was a joy to write in. dBASE had name recognition but was
| unwieldy in many ways.
|
| Having two flagship database products unfortunately led to a
| confused strategy and neither product thrived after the
| acquisition.
| teilo wrote:
| Borland bought Aston-Tate in 1991, 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. The dBase ODBC drivers could sometimes
| be hit or miss when used with Clipper DBFs.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| Borland bought Paradox (was developed by Ansana (???)) as a
| me-too move when their biggest competitors Microsoft/Lotus
| was moving into databases.
| wenc wrote:
| I don't remember this history -- Borland bought Ansa
| Paradox in 1987.
|
| Microsoft had no desktop database product then. It bought
| FoxPro in 1992 and Access was released in 1992.
|
| Lotus also had no desktop database product then. Lotus
| bought Approach in 1994.
|
| The dominant desktop database products of the time were
| dBASE/xBASE (Clipper, FoxPro etc.).
|
| Which database products from MS/Lotus were you thinking of?
| teilo wrote:
| Borland had very little except "me too" products, TBH.
| Pascal, C++, etc. But Delphi was a nice system, FWIW. Of
| all the Borland products, this one had the longest shelf-
| life, now still actively developed by Embarcadero.
| wenc wrote:
| 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
| 1-2-3's. Paradox had innovations that superseded dBASE.
| Turbo Pascal was a popular product on its own merit (UCSD
| Pascal, Quick/MS Pascal never caught on commercially).
| Turbo C and Quick C were competitors, and many
| applications back in the day used the Turbo Vision text
| UI.
|
| In the 1980s 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.
| teilo wrote:
| Dude, I used to use Visicalc.
| wenc wrote:
| Which should help you understand my perspective even
| better. I don't agree that Borland "had very little
| except "me too" products" just because another product in
| the same category existed first. Lotus 1-2-3 was
| essentially a clone of VisiCalc on the IBM PC but it was
| also its own thing.
| pjmlp wrote:
| For DB applications, I got introduced to xBase via dBase III,
| then moved into Clipper Summer '87, followed by Clipper 5.x
| including doing OOP stuff in it.
|
| And that was it, Visual Objects was a disappointment and I
| eventually fully focused on C++/TPW based applications on
| Windows 3.x.
| teilo wrote:
| 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. Evidently it still survives in
| some incarnation: http://www.cassoftware.com/tas/manual/ind
| ex.html?btrievesetu...
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| We used it under DOS for our backoffice system - you
| talked to the "database" engine using an interrupt via
| loaded as a TSR utility.
| myth2018 wrote:
| 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.
| CurtHagenlocher wrote:
| FWIW, Paradox was also originally an acquisition by Borland,
| from a company named "Ansa Software".
| rbanffy wrote:
| In the end Borland acquired what was left of Aston Tate, so I
| guess it's fair to call it Borland now.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| I started my coding career when I discovered you could compile
| your Dbase III code (CRUD stuff) using the Clipper compiler into
| a DOS executable.
|
| Then Clarion was released with it's amazing app generator.
| rbanffy wrote:
| The tool that impressed me most back then was Dataflex version 2.
| Version 3 felt very PC-centric and added some OOP ideas that
| didn't feel right. It was trivially easy to quickly write a
| screen layout and derive table structure from it. From there to a
| full-function CRUD was more or less nothing.
|
| I like to compare it to "Rails for the VT-100".
|
| That and Mantis (not sure the version) on an IBM mainframe
| (something like "Rails for the 3270")
| CurtHagenlocher wrote:
| Both dBase III and dBase IV predate the acquisition by Borland.
| This kind of stuff is super easy to fact-check, so I'm always a
| bit put off by pieces which make those kinds of factual errors.
| ghaff wrote:
| In fact, it was at least in part the screwed up introduction of
| dBase IV that led to Borland's acquisition of Ashton-Tate.
| akx wrote:
| Yet the installer screenshots pretty clearly say Borland.
| ghaff wrote:
| Presumably Borland rebranded after they acquired Ashton-Tate.
| CurtHagenlocher wrote:
| As per the sibling comment, Borland acquired Ashton-Tate
| after dBase IV 1.0 shipped in part because it was such a
| disastrous release. I think 2.0 was the first Borland
| release.
| ghaff wrote:
| "dBase was THE first commercially successful DBMS in computing
| history"
|
| Got to love people who think computing didn't exist before the
| PC.
| airhead969 wrote:
| It just wasn't a strongly-relational one. Marketing! xD
| rbanffy wrote:
| Back then I refused to call it a database. It was more like a
| data bundle or data bunch.
| airhead969 wrote:
| Pretty much. It was a queryable, flat file spreadsheet
| verging on what we would call a NoSQL these days.
| Referential disintegrity.
| the-dude wrote:
| Please name this first commercial succesful DBMS you are
| thinking about then.
|
| For me, only Oracle comes to mind.
| ghaff wrote:
| IBM IMS goes back to 1968 (originally developed for NASA).
| Cincom's TOTAL was sometime around the early 1970s. I'm sure
| there were databases on DEC's PDP systems. And so forth.
| dBase II was an important early database product for CP/M and
| then DOS systems but there were many earlier databases on
| mainframes and minicomputers.
| the-dude wrote:
| Thanks for the follow-up.
|
| > there were many earlier databases on mainframes and
| minicomputers
|
| We were talking about commercially successful DBMS. From
| the Wikipedia-page it is still not clear to me when IMS
| became a DBMS for example. Wikipedia lists TOTAL as
| released in 1982.
| ghaff wrote:
| IMS was always a database. But it was hierarchical rather
| than relational. I was thinking TOTAL was earlier than it
| was though given the company had been in business for
| quite a while.
|
| What is true is that pretty much all the earlier database
| products were tied to specific system hardware. In fact,
| Cincom (which developed TOTAL over time) was arguably the
| first independent software vendor. So there were lots of
| databases being put out by successful computer companies
| (indeed most of them). They just weren't products you
| would buy or use unless you were also using a particular
| manufacturer's hardware.
| specialist wrote:
| MicroRIM's R:Base had modest success, pre client/server. It
| was always a true RDBMS. I had used R:Base for "real work"
| and dBase (and kin) for flatfile type stuff.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R:Base
|
| I've always wondered how Oracle swept the industry, and
| R:Base did not. Probably multiple factors.
|
| Like Oracle's initial customers had big iron and those
| enterprise contracts are big money. Whereas R:Base was part
| of the personal computer revolution and so probably wasn't
| even considered.
|
| In my mind, MS Access was the market fit successor. IIRC,
| Access was the first "workgroup" (network file sharing vs
| true client/server) RDBMS to make the jump to GUI. A bit like
| Excel displaced Lotus 1-2-3.
|
| Too bad. Much as I came to love Access, I also loved R:Base.
| leeter wrote:
| Not relational but IBMs Information Management System (IMS)
| comes to mind.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Information_Management_Sys.
| ..
|
| dBase appears to be the first DBMS for minicomputers however.
| ghaff wrote:
| microcomputers. But, yes, that was probably the case. At
| least the first one of any significance that I can recall.
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(page generated 2021-03-04 23:01 UTC)