Even today, many devs think in terms of having the entire table available. SEEK, LOCATE, etc are used. They should be thinking in sets of data.

FWIW when VFP was due for release, dBase had a version that allowed you to "use" a whole remote table that was downloaded in a similar fashion to a VFP table- IOW not the whole lot at once. You could browse, seek, whatever, and it used indices to download just the data you needed plus a bit extra to allow scrolling in a grid. From memory it did use that database they tried to promote- BDE? Anyway, if you remember Jeff Winchell, he swore by this method of remote data access. But Remote views always made more sense to me. Still do, fwiw. ;-)