My first real paying gig was Access 97 (I'm old). They actually taught it at my university at the time in the MIS/CIS path. I built a credentialing system for a small HMO. I was able to get it to support over 100 people, including report load. I split out the database from the front end (forms/reports) and put the database files on an NT4 share. When we grew and it started to buckle under load, I created an additional read-only share and replicated the read-write database to the read-only database every so often. This allowed me to split the users' load between those that needed read/write and those that needed read only.

Talk about a rapid design tool of both forms and reports (and schema), Access was tough to beat. I think Corel/WordPerfect had a similar concept as well.

Good times.