
Interview with Wayne Ratliff, author of dBASE (1986) - eigenvalue
http://www.foxprohistory.org/interview_wayne_ratliff.htm
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yardshop
This is wonderful to read, and brings back so many memories. I made my living
off of dBASEIII+ for several years, starting around the time of this article.
I was just thinking about it this past week so it's a great coincidence to see
this come up.

    
    
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I wrote some very involved data entry screens and report generating software
with it. My company's billing and payroll ran off of it for many years. I had
inherited the initial versions of it, produced by a third party consultant at
great expense, too much so to have them continue to maintain it. I eventually
would rewrite nearly all of it, and attempted rewriting it in dBASE 5 several
times but it was too much work for one person. I was the only "computer guy"
in the company at the time. So we continued with the db3 version for several
years, eventually adding parts in Topaz for Turbo Pascal, output to PCL for
fancy laser printed payroll sheets (to be sent to the main office to be
reentered by hand because they didn't trust data transfer yet!), and many
other crutches.

You could write extensions in Assembler to provide whatever unique
capabilities you might want, such as coloring or scrolling a block of
characters on the screen, or hiding and showing the text cursor. And I
remember the feeling of amazement the first time I was able to run a command
window and a separate dBase window in Windows 3.11, as well as The Semware
Editor and LIST, all at the same time! I no longer had to exit dBase and get
back into the editor and vice versa!

I still have a working copy of it on an external drive. Time to go give it a
spin!

~~~
toddh
Me too. Still a superior development experience in many ways.

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eigenvalue
It's amazing to me how different things are now in the particulars (e.g.,
computers are probably a million times faster, and you can get a much better
and more featured database like Postgres/SQLite for free rather than pay
hundreds of dollars for a commercial one) and yet how similar they are in a
general sense. You still have people like Wayne out there creating software,
motivated by the same kinds of reasons and with the same tastes and
proclivities. You still have the same conflict between productive
technologists torn between technical work and management as their company
scales. And the startup grind he describes is obviously still relevant.

It's a good thing that he stuck with the database rather than quickly turning
his attention to natural language processing, since that is only starting to
advance in meaningful ways in the last decade now that we have the required
data and compute resources-- he would have been very frustrated!

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Stratoscope
> _I took the JPLDIS concept, cut back on the specs, and wrote Vulcan. JPLDIS
> would handle two hundred fields, but I thought sixteen was plenty. I got it
> working and a little over a year after I started, I did my taxes on it. So,
> I figured Vulcan had some commercial potential, and I began to polish it up
> and get it to a sellable stage. In October 1979, I went to market and put my
> first ad for Vulcan in BYTE magazine, and I ran a quarter-page ad for four
> or five months thereafter. I got much more response than I could handle._

Here's the ad:

[https://archive.org/details/byte-
magazine-1979-10-rescan/pag...](https://archive.org/details/byte-
magazine-1979-10-rescan/page/n165/mode/1up)

Only $490, or the equivalent of $1860 today.

Lots of other great old ads and articles in these BYTE Magazines! archive.org
has a bunch of them.

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wenc
I started out with dBASE III+ but never really got it. Borland had a far
superior product in Paradox (which they bought from Ansa). Paradox 3.5 helped
me understand the power of relational databases -- the Paradox Application
Language (PAL) was an amazing language and so was Query-By-Example (QBE).

But Borland also decided to buy Ashton-Tate so for a while they owned both
dBASE and Paradox. dBASE became the red-headed stepchild in the Borland world,
but still consumed Borland resources to develop and maintain. It was a weird
time in the industry.

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pjmlp
This brings back memories, I was introduced to xBase via dBASE III+, then we
got to learn Clipper Summer '87, and I jumped into Clipper 5 for some projects
freelancing outside school (Hurray OOP support!).

So it was basically Turbo Pascal / Assembly for general purpose programming
and Clipper for anything DB related.

Still remember how hard it was to initially understand RDMS, given how much I
happened to use xBase, thus I was kind of attached to its DB model.

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cyberferret
dBase II, III+ and (ugh) IV developer here... Nice to see some of these
earlier interviews with the likes of C. Wayne Ratliff and Anders Heljsberg
etc. I remember one of my favourite interviews back in the day was reading a
Wayne Ratliff one in what I think was 'Byte' magazine.

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eigenvalue
For those curious about dBASE, this video from 1984 gives a good (and amusing)
overview:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0ng2Tp01Hc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0ng2Tp01Hc)

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pdonis
This offhand comment took me back:

"Now you can buy an AT, with a hard disk, complete and ready to roll for
$6,000."

I couldn't afford an AT when I got my first computer; I spent $1,200 on a
Leading Edge Model D, an 8088 with 512K of RAM, no hard drive, and two 360K
floppies. Then I had to figure out how to have it set up a RAM disk on every
boot for commonly used programs since loading them from the floppy drive was
so slow. But even a 10 MB hard drive was beyond my means at the time.

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RcouF1uZ4gsC
> I went out and bought lots of books on natural language and artificial
> intelligence. I kept getting drawn from one place to another, and I did lots
> of experiments.

It's amazing how some things in computer programming never change.

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Arcanum-XIII
What I remember the most with dBase is the immediate feedback loop you got:
start the exe and you were set to work. I miss quite often this feeling,
especially when trying to explore ideas. The second thing I miss is the
integration you got: it was so easy to switch from ´developing’ to using the
stuff you wrote.

So now I can do so much more, but even for simple problem the setup is
laughably complex. I wish we could have both.

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DmitryOlshansky
> Ted Glasser, who has a number of patents and is a very senior person in the
> computing industry, and is in Who's Who, once told people that the biggest
> team he could manage was one that could drive out to get pizza in a
> Volkswagen. Since then he's changed his tune--it's now a regular-size
> American car. I wholeheartedly agree with that.

And that’s how we got to 2 pizza teams I guess.

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vzaliva
"After more than fifteen years in the computer industry"

It must be more than that. Maybe 50?

~~~
dwyer
The interview is from 34 years ago.

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tibbydudeza
Anybody remember Framework ???. I developed some apps in it , rather
interesting for it's time.

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jstewartmobile
1986 computing: solving real-life problems for a reasonable price

2020 computing: extracting sensitive information from and selling digital
cornfields to morons

I posit that the latest "value-add" to come out of internet-age computing has
been primarily eugenic in nature--thus necessitating sprawling mothership
full-service complexes to keep nerds from mixing with their marks, and
possibly developing some sympathy/mercy toward them.

