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Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)

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Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)

#21

Post by jasim »

One of the original Fox developers wrote a great behind-the-scenes book about the software and the company culture, uptil their acquisition by Microsoft.

It is one of the more niche, under-appreciated technology books out there: "FoxTales: Behind the Scenes at Fox Software" by Kerry Nietz

FoxPro was originally FoxBase, a clone of dBase III, and in some respects better than dBase - IIRC, it could handle larger files, and worked better on a Novell Netware. FoxBase was however a console application - no windowing and no mouse.

Then in the beginning of 1989, they started working on "FireFox" - that's where the classic FoxPro GUI came to life. It was a big departure from dBase, and the name went thru multiple iterations before it became FoxPro. It was a runaway success. dBase never caught up - dBase IV tried catching up with FoxPro's GUI, but it was buggy, slow, and its lunch was being eaten by Nantucket's Clipper compiler.

It was fun times, but sadly the xBase dialect wars were superseded by the rise of Windows, and by the time people retooled into Delphi and Visual Basic, that went away and the web became the dominant application platform.

Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)

#24

Post by jasim »

jasim wrote: post #21

One of the original Fox developers wrote a great behind-the-scenes book about the software and the company culture, uptil their acquisition by Microsoft. It is one of the more niche, under-appreciated technology books out there: "FoxTales: Behind the Scenes at Fox Software" by Kerry Nietz FoxPro was originally FoxBase, a clone of dBase III, and in some respects better than dBase - IIRC, it could handle larger files,…

correction: dBase IV came out before FoxPro. From the book:

"By the beginning of summer ‘89, FoxPro was turning into an impressive product. As an outgrowth of the new language added to emulate dBase IV, and our new window-based interface, many items present in earlier Fox products were substantially transformed."

Kerry continues:

"By the beginning of summer ‘89, FoxPro was turning into an impressive product. As an outgrowth of the new language added to emulate dBase IV, and our new window-based interface, many items present in earlier Fox products were substantially transformed.

One of these was our text editor. Two commands in the language would present this to a user, MODIFY FILE and MODIFY COMMAND. In FoxBASE+, the editor was simplistic. It just filled the screen with whatever file was being edited. Only one file could be edited at a time, and there was a rigid limit to how big that file could be. It was functional for developing dBase programs, but most hardcore users would buy an additional editing program to do real text editing work.

As coded by Eric, though, the new FoxPro editor was an animal of a different color (no pun intended). It resided in a window and users could have as many text files open concurrently as they liked. They could easily copy and paste text between different files. There was no limit to the size of the file. (No attainable limit, anyway; the actual limit for a text file was larger than most modern disk drives.) It was also blindingly fast. It could open hundreds of files in seconds and scroll text faster than it could be read."

Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)

#26

Post by altun »

codeulike wrote: post #13

Foxpro had an embedded db engine and so SQL commands could be used directly in the language for fetching data, which made it fantastic for CRUD database apps, which is what nearly all applications were back in those days. The 'tables' we're just dos files that could sit on a network drive to make the application multi-user. I think there was some limitation with the SQL, e.g. no outer joins, but it was still very han…

C # creator Anders Hejlsberg made a statement a few years after the .net platform came into being, recognizing that data was very important and admitting that they were developing linq.

Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)

#27

Post by kwanbix »

jasim wrote: post #21

One of the original Fox developers wrote a great behind-the-scenes book about the software and the company culture, uptil their acquisition by Microsoft. It is one of the more niche, under-appreciated technology books out there: "FoxTales: Behind the Scenes at Fox Software" by Kerry Nietz FoxPro was originally FoxBase, a clone of dBase III, and in some respects better than dBase - IIRC, it could handle larger files,…

They were bought by Microsoft when they released a version of FoxPro with "rushmore", that made it many times faster than the competion. I still remember the adds.

http://www.foxprohistory.org/rushmore.htm

Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)

#28

Post by fredsted »

carlesfe wrote: post #15

For those curious about Foxpro, I found this link which contains a tutorial with screenshots on how to use it. Worth it just for the very nostalgic Windows 3.1 controls. http://www.dfpug.de/loseblattsammlung%5Cmigration%5Cwhitepap...

Looks like awesome technology, looks like it's easy to build simple CRUD apps without the need for the overhead of webapps

Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)

#29

Post by int_19h »

codeulike wrote: post #13

Foxpro had an embedded db engine and so SQL commands could be used directly in the language for fetching data, which made it fantastic for CRUD database apps, which is what nearly all applications were back in those days. The 'tables' we're just dos files that could sit on a network drive to make the application multi-user. I think there was some limitation with the SQL, e.g. no outer joins, but it was still very han…

It was relatively rare to see SQL in idiomatic FoxPro of old, and more typical to work directly with indices, or use SCAN .. ENDSCAN. That was partly what made it so fast.

2.0 was the first version that changed it, to some extent, because it included the Rushmore query optimizer, which was actually pretty good. But veteran developers didn't trust it much even so.

Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)

#30

Post by int_19h »

carlesfe wrote: post #15

For those curious about Foxpro, I found this link which contains a tutorial with screenshots on how to use it. Worth it just for the very nostalgic Windows 3.1 controls. http://www.dfpug.de/loseblattsammlung%5Cmigration%5Cwhitepap...

TUI in FoxPro for DOS is more nostalgic still:

https://twitter.com/dosnostalgic/status/826566061793345536

It even had a visual GUI editor, and a visual report editor:

https://imgur.com/a/174ZAww

What's especially interesting is that UI code was actually compatible between DOS and Windows versions, so long as you didn't use any platform-specific features (which were mostly Windows-specific, so most DOS apps could be ported very easily).

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