Doug

The first database I used was for the TRS-80, some school-pals and I did production planning work for Fujitsu in 1982. We earned enough at the age of 16-18 to buy several houses each had we been sensible, but inflation and the casino on the Gold Coast soon took care of that... That amount might buy you a small "shopping basket" car these days.

Anyway, we wrote our own databases. We had to- there was one good commercial system, form-based, which cost $19, but it was SLOOW and consumed heaps of resources. Our own databases allowed program + reports + data to reside on a single floppy disk- 90K total. These days you need ore than that just for a printer driver.

I came to FP via the Amiga (still better OS than Windows IMHO, on ROM, instant starts, no possibility of bombardment of service packs, true multi-tasking...) and on the PC I was directed to FP by a doctor colleague who has since written his own practice management software. We thought FP2.0 was just great and there were articles in mainstream rags awarding it the gold medal for usability, performance and power.

When Access came out, we almost shifted there because the database tools were so good but the reason we didn't was because a technique to analyse medical text (since patented) required SET ANSI OFF indexes and Access was slower at those.

FPW was lovely- I still have the first form we created using it, it has a green background and a brown round-edge shape beneath buttons. Urk. We "drew" our own tabs and made FPW apps look quite classy.

IMHO VFP saw FP move from a mainly "user-oriented" tool similar to Access, to a production tool. Sure we did production systems before VFP but there was a lot of kludge- remember the 5 READ levels? Mostly forgotten now with OO and solid app baseclasses but READ made it clear that distributed apps were not FP's primary intent.

Sadly, this major change with VFP was never understood by the market and a lot of managers out there see FP as an ageing user tool used by aging hackers to kludge apps together because they cannot afford a real system like VB or Powerbuilder.

Ah well, it has been quite a cool ride! FP has kept me interested and paid my bills. Still does.

Regards

JR