My introduction to databases was via dBASE III Plus, shortly followed by Clipper Summer '87, and Clipper 5.x (already OOP and some C++ like constructs).

The change to VB/Access and SQL later on took some mind shifting as the concepts on how to design a database are quite different.

Additionally it is quite remarkable the productivity that xBase offered, for a constrained environment like MS-DOS, in an automatic memory managed language, with AOT compilation (when using Clipper, FoxPro and co).