The World Of dBASE (1984) [video] | Hacker News Reader

The World Of dBASE (1984) [video]

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27 pointsTMWNN16 comments

Hey, we have a great product that everyone likes. Let's push a totally buggy and unfinished version IV out in a hurry and see how customers will react...

The video quality is great. U-matic tape? (Or LaserDisc? That would be expensive to press, but the snow 19 minutes in looks like disc-rot.)

dBase III Plus was my introduction to the world of database programming, followed by Clipper Summer '87, and then the C++ OOP influence on Clipper 5.x.

Also it took a while to get my head around SQL, after starting this way, and the way they did record navigation and search.

Pretty much the same for me. FoxPro followed dBase III Plus in my case and then on to Clipper 5.x.

It was delightfully easy to build fully functioning text mode applications. I especially liked the picture clauses on form reads. When I later learned about curses it was a huge disappointment. curses/ncurses with tips from the xBase world would be great for those that need to write terminal applications.

What were those like? I never used any xBase. How was it different?

To display text it was as simple as:

@ row, col say "First Name:"

to draw a box:

@ top_row, top_left to bottom_row, bottom_right

there was built-in support for menus.

there were commands to save the screen to variable and then restore the screen.

main_screen = savescreen

restscreen(main_screen)

Everything was really simple. Forms were super easy. There was a command of the form:

@ row, col say "First name:" get first_name @ row+1, col say "Last name:" get last_name read

Interesting. So you put a series of commands one after the other on the same line of code with no delimiters?

No, sorry, that was me not formatting properly with my comments.

Each statement would be on a separate line:

    @ x, y say "First name"
    @ col2, y get first_name
    @ x, y+2 say "Last name"
    @ col2, y+2 get last_name
    read

I see. So that would generate a form that you could tab around in and enter data into?

Yes. Going back to the top or confirming tha data when exiting the last field was a setting. You may have multiple commands on one row but you have to separate them with a ;

Clipper continued popular in Brazil until early 2000's. It was sometimes called 'software de locadora' (video-rental software) or 'software de farmácia' (drugstore software) since they were so often used in these two cases. During the late 90's there was a wave of replacement of such software with applications made in Delphi.

For some time, this world was fully proprietary in Brazil and you had to pay big bucks for tools or resort to unlicensed copies (piracy). Since the second option was unavailable for the public sector and bigger companies, this created an horrible dependency on proprietary inferior software tools that took around a decade to heal. It is a good thing Linux was so successful in some many points of the stack.

An anecdata: a few years ago I bought something in a drugstore that was running a Linux desktop with DosBox running something in Clipper. I also saw Linux desktops accessing something running in Clipper, in apparently a DOS (virtual?) machine, remotely through telnet. Funny but somewhat ugly reality that is fortunately becoming extinct.

Things only got marginally different (better) when during the first decade of the 2000's systems started to go on-line, mostly with LAMP winning against ASP and then, more recently, with the advent of Android apps coupled with cloud services.

You can still compile dbase/Clipper programs with Harbour, github hosted, open source, Clipper 5.2 compatible compiler that runs almost everywhere, from native windows 64 bit to mac, raspberry, linux, embedded appliances, anywhere there is a c compiler available.

The language has been slightly expanded and with external libraries you may have gui programs (win32, qt, gtk) l, connect to databases (sqlite, mariadb,postgres...) create PDF, excel files.

I have a program started in 1986 on dbase III, then ported to Clipper and now to Harbour...

I'd never heard of Harbor (https://harbour.github.io/), thanks!

I still work on software that started out in dBase II in 1986 or so, then went to FoxBase+ when I started in 1988, then Foxpro and now Visual Foxpro.

My father uses Clipper software in his company to this day. I know some Delphi programmers as well.

Delphi is still alive enough in Germany to keep an yearly conference going.

https://entwickler-konferenz.de/en/

Same story here. I was 12.

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