>>re Esber = couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.
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>>Actually, Esber was a revolutionary....until someone came along and did one better than A-T.
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>>Esber and A-T's reaction was so bad that, were I a novelist writing about a fictional company, I'd never use him as a character...it would seem like too much of a caricature.
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>>dBase IV 1.0 was the 2nd worst product ever released in the history of PC software (Clipper 5.0 being #1, was an utter piece of crap, after almost 2 years of total hype). And like Clipper, what made things worse for A-T was the amount of time to issue a full fix/update. Fox left both in the dust by being able to produce stuff that "worked right the first time". I've always felt the two best product releases (for their time) were FoxPro 1.0 in 1989 and Turbo C 1.0 in 1987. Those products were jewels, absolute jewels that we may never see again.
>
>Turbo Pascal set the standard for the 'Turbo' lineup. That's where I did my first commercial work..

dBase II did it for me. It opened up the whole datacentric application development field that until then had been the domain of high technology priests that had barricaded themselves in the mainframe rooms. I taught dBase II to regular Joes from city and county governments. After just one day of training (on "luggable" Compaqs with a 9" black/green screen and two (!) 5.5" floppy drives) they returned to their desks greatly empowered to take ownership of their own data processing needs. What heady days those were!