>Bob Davies, SBT's owner, told me that he had invested megabucks on a version that used DBase IV and never used a line of that code.
>
>I missed all of that, fortunately.

If you missed it, you were lucky. The performance was god-awful - both the database performance and UI performance for popup windows. They never should have released it - between that and their failed lawsuit against Fox, Ed Esber and Ashton Tate had major egg on their faces.

Yeah, you're right, SBT was so heavily tied to the xBase world.

By the time they released 1.1, it was too late.

As for Clipper 5.0, that thing was a year late (was supposed to be released in late summer 1989 and didn't release until a year later). The virtual memory manager was a complete cluster. Once an app grew in size, forget it...all sorts of VMM errors, and they didn't fix it until spring of 1991.

Those two releases are the worst 2 software releases I can recall since the late 1980's.

The best (relative to its time) was FoxPro 1 in fall of 1989. An amazing piece of work.