>I did a moderate size project in FP Mac (I think it was version 2.6). They used it for gathering huge amounts of complexly related data about their programs, then generate annual reports to various government agencies that funded their work.
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>I was an emproverished newcommer to the world of the entrepreneurship and couldn't afford to spring for a Mac in my office. So I developed on a Windows platform, taking the components to my client's system and running a program I wrote to fix up some minor differences between the platforms that couldn't be handled by testing the platform meta variable, then rebuilt the project on their system.
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>I remember it was a bit clunkier than the Windows version and the interface certainly wasn't very Mac-like, but it wasn't as slow for me as you indicate. Projects compiled in a few minutes. It wasn't that buggy for me either, though I did come across a couple minor bugs and inconcistencies with Windows that were easy to work around. (I also ran across a few bugs in the Windows versions too.) My application was all native FP tables, however, and didn't require any access to external databases. The database also resided on the same machine, so there weren't any networking issues.
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>But the report writer and the data processing beat the pants off the database system they were using before. (Filemaker, I think? I can't recall anymore.)
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>While it wasn't as smooth as working on a Windows platform, they felt it was a big improvement over what they could do without FP.
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And maybe that was the decision right there. If so, maybe it was the right decision, although personally I don't know that Macs were ever designed with databases in mind. Use the right tool for the job, yada yada yada.

It probably was Filemaker. It was the dominant Mac database product, to the extent that such a label isn't an oxymoron. Another one I remember is MacLion. I actually bought that bad boy in my initial wild-eyed enthusiasm for the Mac. There's $400 or so -- in 1980s dollars! -- that would have been better spent on drugs.