>>
>>Just to add my historical $0.02...
>>The PACK command in dBASE II and III was a little iffy. Disk space was also an issue back in the Dark Ages (before Windows, when there was no light < G> ). It was more reliable to copy a file, leaving behind the deleted records. It was also a great help in speeding things up (back in the days of 7MHz) to have the data sorted by primary key order...
>>
>Jen
>
>Ah yes, the bad old days <g>. Did you ever go so far as to put the index and dbf on seperate physical disks to cut down on head movement? How about avoiding memo fields like the plague because they were such storage hogs?
>
>Donny

Oh yeah. And saving dates as julian integers or character fields (yy + jjj).

That was back in the days when I wrote .BAT menus to keep the users away from the A:> prompt -- before we even had a C:> prompt.

My favorite was the following in DBASE II v2.2B

.HELP
.Syntax Error. Would you like some help (Y/N)?
.Y
.Syntax Error. Would you like some help (Y/N)?
.

It has got a little better since then. But there again, so have the opportunities to mess it all up. :~)

Jen