>>One of the joys of my life was spending two days sitting next to Eric in Redmond when an alpha -- nope, not a beta, an alpha - was revealed to the outside world for the first time.

I only joined at beta phase. Spotted enough bugs to be awarded a free advance copy, allowing release of a 32-bit product on the same day as 32-bit Win95 was released. Yep, VFP was MS's first 32-bit 4GL offering (though in fact those early releases were 16/32bit hybrid) and the move from 16-bit to 32-bit was a business no-brainer. Unlike the move to 64-bit. ;-)

That VFP Beta kept me in the VFP fold. Borland had created incentives to move to Delphi, also in Beta. The clincher? Multi-table VFP Remote Views. Delphi had inbuilt change management for single-table views only and once you started to push, you were back into crafting your own SQL on the fly. Just like a lot of modern development models, FWIW. The VFP view was an ultimate encapsulator and those who attack it, usually didn't understand all it could do. Also we were affected by pollution from other models that celebrate exposure of database intricacies and other Rube Goldberg behaviors.