I cut my teeth on dBase II back in the day, and built my first consulting and development company on the back of that, then moving on to Clipper, FoxPro and Cla

I cut my teeth on dBase II back in the day, and built my first consulting and development company on the back of that, then moving on to Clipper, FoxPro and Clarion and other tools over time. I always managed to skirt around Access whenever it came up in client meetings ("Oh, we have this FREE database thingy that came with our word processing and spreadsheet tools - why don't you use that to write our stock control app??"). It has been many years since I have seen Access, and I thank the database gods for that. Nowadays I run an HR SaaS company, but just yesterday we landed the biggest contract of our fledgling company with THE biggest manufacturer in the UK of a certain household product. All the excitement was sucked out of me when they asked if they could integrate our cloud HR system with their internal job costing & time sheet database... which is written in Access!