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Comment by CPLX | Hacker News Reader

FileMaker Pro has been around forever and is still supported with new versions as far as I know.

This brings back incredibly relevant memories: my first paid job back in 2002-2003 was maintaining an old Filemaker database and related forms.

I ended up doing an Access database and created a few forms on top of it, including automation for automatically exporting order forms as Word documents. There were a few gotchas in writing VBA but overall the process was easy to pick up and be productive quickly.

Not that searching is difficult but I'll put the link here anyway: http://www.filemaker.com/products/

1) I didn't know that Filemaker was still around.

2) I didn't know that it is an Apple subsidiary.

3) Pity there's no Linux version, I'd use LibreOffice Base if you're in Linux as someone else here has pointed out.

That's incredible - I remember FileMaker from the 1980s. Look at the functionality of that app and the great design of the site! If that were a startup run by a bunch of hip Millennials out of San Francisco, it'd be worth a couple billion dollars, easily. (Instead we get one-off, single purpose hosted apps like Trello, and FileMaker languishes in obscurity.)

It is incredible, isn't it? You have become more cynical with old age like myself – but I think there is some truth to what you're saying.

I worked on a port of a filemaker database once. During this port but well before the end there was a power outage in the office and the discovered that the filemaker server had entered some sort of silent failure mode where it appeared to be working on the outside but wasn't writing anything to disk. It operated like this for months...

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