>>>
>>>I remember the controversy over the Clipper chip. Hard to believe it was 20 years ago.
>>
>>Well, 25 years ago, there was a bigger Clipper controversy. Clipper 5.0. What a debacle that was. Most unreliable development software of all time.
>
>dBASE IV was a contender, too.
>
>Fox's competitors stumbled badly and let Fox take leadership in xBASE.

dBase IV was really bad, especially in performance. But the bugs in the first release of Clipper were horrible. What made it worse for Clipper was that the 5.01 fix wasn't released until months later (if my memory is correct, Clipper 5.0 came out in late summer 1990, but I don't think I received the 5.01 disk updates until March of 1991)