Hi, Terry.

>I see your point! But when we started - (you're looking younger these days :) - it would take more time to copy a 100KB to a 180KB floppy than it does to download 20MB off the net today - even dialup would seem speed of light compared to the transfer machinery we had then.

Hmmm... I'm not so sure you see my point. You're asking something to the the internet backbone. You want the net to become kind of a giant wan with lightning speed. But this is not something you can handle from a development tool.

>Back then - backing up a 10MB XT, formatting (with /S to make space for SYS.COM:), and restoring the backup (the original,but ugly, defrag method) was an all day job!
>
>Ken is still young - he's smart - he can do it - everything you say makes sense - but the issues are not a barrier - only a challenge. Perhaps NET USE DBFs would be more like XMLs and SEEK would translate into some king of getNode query - and perhaps the return would be an XML string - I don't know - and I don't need to understand the physics of the "transaction", but I sure would happy if I could do it!

I'm not sure about Ken, but I'm definitively younger each day, as you noticed! 8-)

Anyway, you can't really translat the seek/scan way of doing things to a set-oriented methodology, but going even deeper: why would you really wanto to do that? While xBase hardcore fans still want to do things that way, most of the software industry is happy and productive with resultset-oriented data access? Can't be time to read about theory after all? Can you at least concede that maybe the Database research field on the last 30 years could have arrived to a better semantics than Jeb Long?

Un abrazo,