The Rise and Fall of Ashton-Tate (2023)
abortretry.fail
abortretry.fail
I was utterly gobsmacked to find that it became pretty popular in South America, where Visual FoxPro was wildly popular in some fields. VFP users were left with gigabytes of data in xBase and weren't sure how to easily get it into a "big" database. Someone found my little project and it spread like wildfire, to the point that I got invited to a few conferences to speak about it. I wasn't able to go at the time because of life reasons, but one of my minor regrets was not going to Brazil to talk to a roomful of people who somehow, some way, all decided that I'd written a roadmap to get them out of a pickle.
Thanks, Ashton-Tate. I have some fun stories to tell due to your inventions.
Its pinnacle was Fox Pro LAN, at which point Microsoft embraced (bought), extended (Visual Fox Pro), and extinguished it. Microsoft didn't randomly gain a reputation for being evil, it thoroughly earned that.
Anyway, this should be a good lesson for anyone thinking about using Microsoft technologies.
DBase, and all its derivatives were everywhere.
Additionally, before VB and Delphi took over this market, many MS-DOS xBase refugees found a new home in Visual Fox Pro.
I still recall the night I picked up the massive package, unpacked the 5 1/4" floppies, started it on my 286 (I don't even think I had a HD in 1988) and ... It didn't work. The most basic straightforward functions in then manual failed to perform the way they were documented. I was certain that it had to be my computer, because there was no possible way that Ashton Tate could ship a product, beautifully packaged, and documented that was just ... broken? And Slow.
I'd forgotten how tragic that loss was (it was a lot of money for me ).
I have to believe that whatever processes or behavior that led up to that was the trigger for the downfall of Ashton Tate.
I tried to transition my company to Borland dBASE 5 when it came out but there was too much to try to upgrade all at once. I was really excited about a lot of the language improvements, and the fact that it was now coming from a real language company, but it was too much too late. A few years later my company moved to different software altogether and dBASE was just a (mostly) fond memory.
My most productive use of it was with the Topaz library for Turbo Pascal from Software Science. They provided a much more powerful UI capability than one could get from "@ 1,1 say ..." with drop down lists and moveable windows etc. It was still all character mode DOS stuff, but we had the whole menagerie running in Windows for Workgroups for a good while. Those were fun days.
I managed to do it by configuring the serial port as the printer, at 9600/n/8/1.
I used a null modem into my laptop, and captured the output with Procomm.
Fun times.
The serial printer port trick is very clever too. I don't think my transfer was as fast as 9600. Good job!
"The consultants wanted something like $200 per disk to convert them."
As P.T. Barnum said, there's a sucker born every minute. Your coworkers hopefully thanked you for letting that be the next guy.
Edit: he might not have said it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_sucker_born_ever...
What were you doing for 30 minutes?!?
Either way, that would be a hell of a high end system for that time.
Before 5, they had season names, I didn't mention to be using Clipper Summer '87 in 1987, rather having used it.
They are much faster to operate and more efficient for CRUD type apps then GUI based ones.
Losing Access and similar things has lead to Salesforce being a billion dollar company; when it's basically AccessOnline™.
They had one IT guy that managed everything and I remember him saying it was either going to be Apple or some Linux distro and by using Apple for all their stuff, it greatly reduced the amount spent on tons of other IT stuff that he would have to deal with if it were Windows based.
How? Aren't Google & Excel Spreadsheets end user databases?
If you've never used a tool like Access, it's hard to explain just how powerful it really is for ordinary people.
In some ways, it's a hark back to the day of a really 'thick' client that was a server, middleware and client all in one.
Looks like there are some additional configurations that MS actively supports: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/ways-to-share-an-...
If I had to throw together a reasonably robust data entry form in a time crunch today and could connect to the DB engine via ODBC, I'd probably still use Access for that.
It seems we have decided to go the SaaS route instead and you get online only things that sort of play at Access, but "with cloud".
I specifically remember Multimate, the Word Processor, and Framework, the "office suite" I guess.
But dbase was 90%+ of what Ashton-Tate did so the success of that made of broke the company.
All the capability of Mac OS, but with the speed and hotkeys of a department store POS system. I don't know if it had a graphic component, because I ran it on an IBM XT with an MDA display.
I tried to find Framework disks online a few years ago so I could relive it under DOSBox, but came up empty.
https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2007/08/01/life-af...
The Rise and Fall of Ashton-Tate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36257178 - June 2023 (1 comment)
The Rise, Fall and Survival of Ashton-Tate's dBASE - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6426540 - Sept 2013 (25 comments)
PC: What is this “big picture”?
RATLIFF: I have to be a little careful about what I answer. It's probably safe to say Artificial Intelligence.
PC: How would you define Artificial Intelligence?
RATLIFF: One way to define Artificial Intelligence is "making computers easier to use." However, we don't Just want to make them five percent easier to use, want to make them dramatically easier to use. We are looking for a breakthrough. Eventually, what we want Artificial Intelligence to do is to take over mechanical duties, to free people for non-mechanical things. I want to see computers in my lifetime — preferably in my hand — performing chores in a human, nonrigid, easy-to-use way. I'd like to be able to tell the computer, "Go and total all the checks I wrote in the last 10 years for medical expenses." That's a nonrigid request.
PC: Do you foresee that dBASE II will be a nucleus for an artificially intelligent system?
[0]: https://archive.org/details/PC-Mag-1984-02-07/page/n135/mode...
Susan Lammers: Have you ever explored the field of artificial intelligence?
Wayne Ratliff: I was really involved in AI at the start of this business. A little over a year ago, I turned to AI, because I thought that was the future. But I've grown away from it.
AI has a future, but it's not very immediate. First of all, there's the problem of natural language. If you have a natural-language system, you buy it and bring it home and put it on your computer. Then you have to go through a weeks-long, maybe months-long process to teach it what your particular words mean. The same word has different meanings in different contexts. Even what would appear to be a straightforward word, like "profit," can have a variety of meanings. It needs to be very explicitly defined, based on which business you're in and how your books are set up, and that sort of thing. So this long process necessary for training the machine kills AI, as far as it being a turnkey product.
But the other side, which is very interesting, is expert systems. My prediction is that within the next two or three years, expert systems will no longer be associated with artificial intelligence. That's been the history of AI: when something starts to become fairly well known, it splits off. Pattern recognition used to be considered AI, but now it is a separate field. That's the immediate destiny of expert systems. I think expert systems are going to be very important in our industry, analogous to vertical applications.
I think it's from this book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2092682.Programmers_at_W...
It's a fun read, although it goes a bit off the rails at the end, crapping on Linux and open source.
It was essential for the department to function, but had grown into an abomination as many students worked on it.
In particular, the app barely fit in memory so this enterprising student had updated all the code so each command was shortened from the full name to the first four letters, which DBase would accept as valid. Then removed all the comments and extra white space!
This kluge apparently afforded enough extra memory that the app could run!
I noped out of there, and referred my friend for the job. (Sorry Jeff!)
DBase was really useful in some situations, but like all programming tools it could be badly misused!