>http://www.pcjs.org/modules/shared/templates/pdf.html?url=/pubs/pc/magazines/pctj/PCTJ-1987-04/pages/PCTJ-1987-04%2054.pdf&page=54&total=218
>
>PC Tech Journal reviewed FoxBASE, Clipper, and Quicksilver in Spring 1987. THIS IS HISTORY.
>
>I still clearly remember the day I read this article. I was eating breakfast at a hotel in Parris Island, South Carolina, the day my brother was graduating from Marine Boot Camp. I sat there for over an hour, eating bacon and eggs and reading this article.
>
>I was 22 years old and had just pocketed about $1,500 for doing a dBase app for EDS. I was a liberal arts major and self-taught developer and wanted to work in this industry so badly I would have walked miles through a desert for it.
>
>Previously as a teen I always looked at adults who loved their careers as total whackos - but then I discovered what lit them up. The day I read this article (again and again and again) was my flash point.
>
>Later in 1987 Borland released Turbo-C. Then Sequitur Software released a CodeBase library that allowed C developers to maintain dBase tables. Then I landed my first job and was mentored by Fox author Mike Antonovich. A perfect storm.
>
>And then the boys from Perrysburg released the most fantastic 1.0 product of all time - FoxPro 1 in the fall of 1989. And then a year later I won an award from USDA for some Fox apps I wrote.
>
>I was damn fortunate - I came into the industry at the perfect time.
>
>Always fun to take a stroll down memory lane.

The pace of innovation in those days was ferocious. It makes today's progress look evolutionary at best; trivial or marketing-driven/"tyranny of small differences" at worst.

I subscribed to Byte mag and would pick up copies of DDJ on the newsstand if something exciting or exotic caught my eye. Sometimes it felt like you could learn more from reading one issue of either of those than from a semester of any computer course of the day.

The ads were almost as interesting as the articles - long-forgotten products with (at the time) revolutionary potential.

The best 1.0 product I ever used was Borland Turbo Pascal 1.0 for CP/M.