dBase: 1979-2026

I remember dBASE IV from my childhood days when my father, who had no computer background, was required to take computer training by his workplace. My father and his colleagues were given free evening computer lessons by their company, taught by the same teachers who used to teach us, the kids, computers in our school.

After their first class, he brought home a fat dBASE IV manual. Since I was very interested in computer books, I read a good portion of it even though I had never touched dBASE in my life. I would daydream of all the little forms, queries, reports and labels I could make with dBASE. But I never got to touch dBASE in my life. We kids used to get LOGO lessons instead in school.

One day my father came back from his evening lesson mildly distressed about something he had learnt. He said they were being taught loops but in the loop there was an equation that seemed just plain wrong. It was:

  i = i + 1

How could that be a valid equation? How could i ever equal i + 1? He mentioned that he had asked the teacher about it and from what I could gather, my teacher and my father were talking past each other. The teacher probably tried explaining that it was not an equation but an instruction instead, whereas my father continued to interpret i = i + 1 as an equation due to the algebra he was so familiar with. It sort of held up the class for a while.

The teacher asked my father's name, perhaps so that he could talk to him separately later. But when he learnt my father's name, he realised that his son, me, went to the same school where he taught. So he told my father, 'When you get back home, ask your son about i = i + 1. He will explain it to you better than I am able to.'

And indeed I was able to explain it to him pretty well. I was eight or nine years old back then. And that was probably the first thing I taught my father!

Some of my earliest programming exposure was a dBASE IV book my dad had for work, though it was some time before I put any of it into action. At that time I was reading manuals like fiction, only slowly realizing that I could actually use some of it with our computer.

What the article describes doesn't apply to those who migrated already to FoxPro (and/or Harbour), yes?

I want to say no. As a way of working those dbms systems were a dead end. Not every problem is database tables and having had a job replacing a dBase III system I never want to see it or its ilk again

I find this blog consistently negative (check other posts.) Although this post is interesting, and I know little about dBase and this is a sad story, I am simply not sure how accurate all of the blog as a whole is. I can best suggest, take its statements as someone's personal opinion, not necessarily as fact, ie but with a pinch of salt.

> It is believed that - alongside the BOLD source code (missing for more than 10+ years), the BDE and many original dBase source code was lost during the ill fated Borland + Corel merger (which was eventually called off).

This is confusing because the article is supposedly about dBase, and I have no idea why Bold is relevant. It's an example of where I feel the general negativity of the blog veers into random discussions.

To the best of my knowledge, the Bold source was not lost. In fact, Embarcadero open sourced it several years ago. The blog post has details: https://blogs.embarcadero.com/bold-for-delphi-is-open-source... I worked there at the time though I did not drive its open sourcing, but it is a positive move, and clearly contrasts the blog's statement. It appears actively maintained and updated these days. I would differentiate 'lost' from 'owned but not made available publicly'.