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I was wondering how on earth anything like this could've been developed - now it's making more sense. BANCstar probably was intended to be something like Visual

I was wondering how on earth anything like this could've been developed - now it's making more sense. BANCstar probably was intended to be something like Visual Basic or Hypercard, where the bulk of the development was done using a high-level visual designer, but for whatever reason the suite ended up half-baked. Devs then get forced to use the intermediate language directly, and no budget is ever allocated to finish the product because they actually seem to be managing with the half-baked version just fine.

masklinn 5y ago
> and no budget is ever allocated to finish the product because they actually seem to be managing with the half-baked version just fine. TFA talks about BANKStar 5.1c but the wikipedia article mentions that BANCStar 10 switched the screencode (bytecode) to binary, so it looks like the thing kept on trucking for a while. And the programmer kept stretching the thing for purposes it was not really intended to (possibly because it was difficult to get approval for better techs), as reading between the line and other articles on the subject it looks like BancSTAR was really a glorified forms creator / manager, which makes some of the limitations make more sense e.g. 2000 labels, choices and fields in a single form (even across multiple screens) seems like a pretty generous limit at first glance.