>>>
>>>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).

How about saving dates as two characters, actually containing a 16 bit number in the format used in the DOS directory structure (7 bits year, 4 bits month, 5 bits date)? I still have this function somewhere :) (found it today in an old app - still in use for creating primary key in it). Or, the same thing in Cobol, using a three byte BCD number...