>I enjoyed reading your resoponse, I am not to worried about MS going out of bussiness because they seem to adjust well to change. I read your response about the cost of memory back what seems so long ago and think about the cost today, which made me wonder what the cost of software was back then compared to now, I would think that it must be cheaper today for the most part. But anyway my main point today really was things change and if we dont adjust we will go to the same place your drives did the other day.
>
>Bill Winter
>Remember to Strive For Excellance.

Bill;

Here are some prices of software as I remember them:

dBase II $795 – I bought this January1982
Pascal $795 – Also January 1982
FoxBase LAN $795 - forgot the year (1987 ?) but it is still bubble wrapped!

I also owned WordStar Version 0.92. I do not remember the price but it was "cool"! :) Two small files that fit on a floppy. It was a good word processor, and it did not have a stupid paper clip to bug you! Oh, you want to write a letter? The things we could do with 64 K of memory! You learned how to write tight, fast code. I wrote many routines in Assembler.

Along came a company called Borland and sold Pascal for about $70 as I recall. That had great impact on the industry. It was also faster than my $795 program.

Ashton Tate sent you the famous gray binder and about every two or three months they sent updates to the program and documentation. Imagine being able to open two tables (maximum) at a time! This gave the feeling of “power” and we had “relational tables”.

Here is an aside. My first data based application for the PC was for the Calibration/Metrology Laboratory where I worked at Ampex Corporation. We had 30,000 pieces of test and measurement equipment and each one had a 6" X 9” file index card with its history. This was required by DOD MIL STD 45662A. In 1982 it took dBase II 14 hours to reindex the files, which we did daily. With dBase III it took 45 minutes and with “The Fox” it took 45 seconds. Why do I like all versions of FoxPro? :)

Tom