Has anyone remembered .... ? 1

[Tom Borgmann]

in 1994 I just had finished my first word processor written in a unix language making lots of use of 'awk' and 'sed' for spelling correction, db access for mail merge and so on. I was then asked to try a tool called VisualBasic 3.0 for making the switch to windows. After two weeks I was convinced that VB wasn't a tool to build fast datacentric apps and should never be used by us. After that I had just begun to play around with a tool that used some kind of object based Pascal but I can't remember its name anymore. And then someone came up with trying FPW2.5 and short time later 2.6.
I still can remember how much work we did, just to give the forms a 3d look by placing light and dark grey lines around all the text- and comboboxes. Man, I would have killed the guy that came up with this idiotic idea (if it hadn't been me, though). After a few weeks we had our first windows based app running and then had to learn, that shipping it was a whole other story. Including and excluding the correct files/tables was a process I learned as I installed the software at the first customer.
Shortly after that, VFP 3.0 came up and we grabbed it with a vengeance. At that time it did real miracles and we could only laugh at another department that was still trying OOP with VB3. My, those poor dudes made our day on a hourly basis. Some years later they eventually switched to Delphi.
Well that's a long time ago, but I hadn't placed it in 95 if Mike hadn't come up with it. Now I'm just indulging in nostalgia
At that time our main app was still programmed in SCO UNIX and we started switching it to windows with VFP 6 then. Our first attempt was to immitate the informix tables with VFPs own database but after 2 years we dropped that attempt because of to many damaged indexes and too many data that had to be stored and way too many users that needed access. So when the Y2K works ended we made the switch to ODBC and that was (after selecting VFP as development platform) the 2nd best decision ever.

-Tom

-Tom

https://www.blogger.com/profile/08903165976787522012

 

[Phil Thoms]

Interesting memories. I Started with Dbase II in 1985, followed by Dbase III and Foxbase. FoxPro 1.0 and 2.0 for DOS then 2.5 and 2.6 for Windows. VFP 3 in 1995/6, VFP 5 a short time later and stayed with VFP 6 from the late nineties. By now I should have updated to VFP 9 but VFP 6 has always fulfilled requirements. Still maintaining some programs written in FP 2.6 for Windows. Happy days.

 

[Olaf Doschke]

My first encounter was with VFP6, and it was a steep learning curve even for someone with experience in several languages from C/C++ over Pascal, Basic/VBA, Perl, and PHP. I had to rewrite a lab software, not just a mere business application. Including COM-Port addressing of electronic Scales, for example. And data transfer via ZMODEM, later simpler by Floppy and Thumbdrive. And the goalposts were shifted by large from the original version, so there was no inheritance or reuse of old code. The largest aspect of the design phase was given on the redesign of data - ca. 100 tables with individual structures were put into a set of <10 tables in 4NF database design.

Bye, Olaf.

Olaf Doschke Software Engineering

https://www.doschke.name

 

[Auguy]

Boy that was a long time ago.
Hope all of you old timers are doing well (Mike, Olaf, Tamar), surely I'm forgetting somebody.
Thanks to all of you that have helped me over the years.

Back in the good old days I used to take a 5 minute drive over to Perrysburg Ohio to pick up my Fox DOS updates.

Auguy
Sylvania/Toledo Ohio

 

[rob444]

I also started with Dbase II in the 80's and used Dbase III and Foxbase 1 and 2 and quickly found that nothing was faster than Foxbase, continued with foxbase 2.5 and 2.6 and the windows versions but at the time I was not charmed by Windows at all so I didn't use that as much but with VFP 3 and 5 I completely switched to windows and of course continued with VFP6-9.
Too bad that there still is no real successor to VFP9!