dBase: 1979-2026

I remember dBASE from my childhood days when my father, who had no computer background, was required to take computer training by his workplace. My father and his colleagues were given free evening computer lessons by the same teachers who used to teach us, the kids, computers in our school.

After their first class, he brought home a fat dBASE manual. Since I was very interested in computer books, I read a good portion of it even though I had never touched dBASE in my life. I would daydream of all the little forms, queries, reports and labels I could make within dBASE. But I never got to touch dBASE in my life. We kids used to get LOGO lessons instead in school.

One day my father came back from his evening lesson mildly distressed about something he had learnt. He said they were being taught loops but in the loop there was an equation that seemed just plain wrong. It was:

  i = i + 1

How could that be a valid equation? How could i ever equal i + 1? He mentioned that he had asked the teacher about it and from what I could gather, my teacher and my father were talking past each other. The teacher probably tried explaining that it was not an equation but an instruction instead, whereas my father continued to interpret i = i + 1 as an equation due to the algebra he was so familiar with. It sort of brought the class to a halt.

The teacher asked my father's name, perhaps so that he could talk to him separately later. But when he learnt my father's name, he realised that his son, me, went to the same school where he taught. So he told my father, 'When you get back home, ask your son about i = i + 1. He will explain it to you better than I am able to.'

And indeed I was able to explain it to him pretty well. I was eight or nine years old back then. And that was probably the first thing I taught my father!

One of my favourite DB systems, started with dBase III+ where our teacher made us enter the high-school library records, followed up with Clipper Summer '87, and shortly thereafter Clipper 5.x with its OOP extensions.

Great productivity tool, garbage collected, compiled, in the constrained environment of MS-DOS PCs.

The migration to Windows 3.1 took too much time, giving time to FoxPro, Access, Visual Basic and Delphi to establish themselves to the same programming communities.

Similar to other HNers, Clipper was also how I made my first attempts to working for others during high school.

My very first paid gig, aged 12, was figuring out how to print mailing labels from a Bondwell CP/M laptop running dBase II. Didn't enjoy it.

Resurrect this kind of language is one of my goals (https://tablam.org) but of course with different takes.

I think the main gist: you work not as app developer but as db developer, is something that is missing in some partial attempt like access and such.

BTW: Wanna join me or help?

I feel the timeline is wrong re when dBase Inc took over. I remember working as a consultant on shipping new features for dBase back in 2000 or so.

I implemented reflection for the dBase language and was also part of trying to convert it to Visual C++ instead of using the Borland compiler. I was very green back then but it was interesting, my only time dealing with interpreters / compilers

You may compile .prg files with Harbour, an open source Clipper clone compiler, on github.

Strange it is not cited in the post.

My first gig at 18 was managing my university library's database (in dBase III; it was the 1980s) and writing the user interfaces for searching. This was a pre-SQL database for you youngins in case you have no idea what I'm talking about.

Microsoft Access 2.0 had filters to import and export data from and to DBF files. We used this in WFW 3.11 to convert from DBase to MS-Access and later on SQL Server.

There were some Turbo C and Turbo Pascal source code that read DBF files, but hardly anyone used them. Most stored data is in text files that can be read by any application.

Fascinating obituary for dBase; software history repeats through neglect, litigation, complacency.

One of my first sizeable projects was a COM-compatible compiled language with .dbf support primitives for data transformation. As a unique quirk, it could even work on Novel Netware to interface with Btrieve.

Netware supported loading PE executables, but it lacked memory protection so developing for it was... fun.

The .dbf format was pretty straightforward, though.