6 ms·

The History of FoxPro: Interview with Wayne Ratliff (1986)

105 points by susam 4y ago

iiiji 4y ago
It's a little known fact that the author has a fursona known as 'Barky J. Redtail', and was instrumental in founding some of the early furry communities in Ohio.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
beachy 4y ago
Like turbo pascal, a radically easy to use technology that was wildly successful at the time, but sank without trace in a few years as fashions shifted.
- jslakro 4y ago
  Probably one of the first low code tools in history. Still know solid companies built on top of fox pro solutions, gaining lot of money with simple UIs and BDs
yread 4y ago
I learnt programming with FoxPro. It had so many strange things. To print you just started the line with ? (box drawing and asterisks were used all the time). True and false constants werd .T. and .F.. I used the el editor to write it. Learning vi afterwards felt like such an upgrade
chrisseaton 4y ago
Wow the adverts on this site are intense. Sometimes I wonder if people set up adverts on their own site, but use and ad-blocker themselves and have no idea what the advert script now does to their pages.
keyle 4y ago
Ah foxpro. That was a great interview around dbase (EDIT: foxpro does not build on top of dbase I was wrong). I played around a lot with dbase in my early days. It was very cool. I never felt out of my league. I've seen some of the ugliest yet most functional software done in foxpro. Incredibly easy to build feature rich software that unfortunately looked like dog poop. Which has let them to either profit enough for a modern rewrite in .net, or disappear. Most of the shops that moved to .net highly missed how productive they were with tiny teams in foxpro, and how expensive the move to .net had been. If only foxpro had remained a viable option similar to VB, history might have gone a different way. You have to respect how productive people were in those time. We really took a dive. Budgets blew up, so did team sizes, and here we are. Stacks like foxpro and dbase allowed people like my uncle in his basement to start a massive business, or maintain the list of shirts he sent to the dry cleaners.
- tpmx 4y ago
  > I've seen some of the ugliest yet most functional software done in this. Incredibly easy to build feature rich software that unfortunately looked like dog poop. Can you find any screenshots to illustrate this? I'm curious about how you make the IBM PC 80x25 text screen look like poop. :)
  - keyle 4y ago
    When your product looked like this, it was really hard to compete against new products coming to windows with winform https://winworldpc.com/res/img/screenshots/2x-841fe628c2d754d58f53be733811c3c1-Foxpro%202.0%20-%20Screen.png https://winworldpc.com/res/img/screenshots/2x-841fe628c2d754... vs. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/desktop/winforms/advanced/media/walkthrough-creating-an-accessible-windows-based-application/visual-basic-pizza-order-form.gif?view=netframeworkdesktop-4.8 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/desktop/winforms/adv...
    - kjellsbells 4y ago
      I dont disagree with you for the era that such comparisons were made, say 1995. But in retrospect I wonder if the kind of people who used these very specific line of business apps were more productive in the gui or the text mode where theyd probably memorized the key sequences by the end of their third day.
kstrauser 4y ago
My Internet claim to fame was writing a program to get people off of FoxPro to PostgreSQL: https://github.com/kstrauser/pgdbf https://github.com/kstrauser/pgdbf FoxPro was nifty in many ways, but nightmarish outside the “single person running the app with the database on their local hard drive” setup. The moment you tried to put the database files on a file share (which is how you used it as a network DB), it was a world of locking pain. And a fun fact: the client libraries were single threaded to the point that you could only run one query at a time per machine. If you had 2 apps running at once, only one of them could be querying at any given time.
- As_You_Wish 4y ago
  No.....there were commands that could be given that made it all run fine. That was 20+ years ago so I forget what it was.
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  It's staggeringly difficult to even just back it up safely if it is in use 24/7. We had some customers that made their FoxPro app "too critical" to the business, which very rapidly becomes an untenable nightmare with no way out.
- blihp 4y ago
  The default behavior made it multi-user unfriendly. A lot of that likely came from trying to remain dBase compatible and beginner friendly. It was actually one of the better (behaved and performing) multi-user DOS and early Windows databases I used that wasn't based on a client/server architecture. It was up to the developer to take care to avoid unnecessary locking. For example, you could open databases in read only mode, avoid locking when browsing via 'browse nomodify', don't lock the database until you actually needed to do your CRUD work etc. If you migrated apps to utilize SQL and other 'modern' (at the time) FoxPro features instead of the legacy FoxBase/dBase syntax much of this was taken care of for you. I had production databases with up to 100 concurrent users before the overhead of the locking mechanism really started to be a problem. (which back in the NetWare days was more than enough for many mid-sized business applications) Just by way of comparison, I saw lots of 'what the hell were they thinking?' multi-user MS Access deployments starting in the late 90's that were even worse... without the ability to mitigate the way FoxPro apps could. That said, of course client/server databases still scaled better, farther and easier.
triceratopz 4y ago
The productivity of FoxPro has never been equaled in any software since.
- As_You_Wish 4y ago
  Yep. I don't understand why at least new technologies don't imitate it. Seems so logical.
- xuesj 4y ago
  I agree with the point. I used Dbase III before using foxpro which help me a lot.
neilv 4y ago
Some of my childhood consulting was in dBase II and III+, and bought a copy of the compatible FoxBase+, to deliver my own database apps to clients who didn't already have dBase. (I also did at least one point-of-sale system using Turbo Database Toolbox.) There are a lot of resemblances of CRUD Web/app programming to 1980s PC database applications. Including things like many people using high-level frameworks/DSLs/painters for forms and reports, and sometimes getting much better results by being able to write code at a lower level. Pretty much all the coding we do today could be learned by a 12-year-old. (Product/project/politics experience takes longer, and judgment hasn't fully leveled up yet.)
fcoury 4y ago
The first language I used professionally was CA-Clipper Summer 87 vesion, which shared many of the dBase and FoxPro characteristics. The company I worked for had this full ERP solution that had many modules, Finances being one if them. I remember we had DBF and NTX files for indexes and you needed to run a reindexing procedure every morning before all the employees would start using the system. Once we got a support call claiming one of the users of such module was freaking out because the system was falsely accusing her. Upon asking for more details we found that the system would stop with the very particular message of “corruption detected” :) The ultimate fix was to ask everybody to logout and run the reindexing procedure, as always. But this funny story always stuck with me.
- throwthere 4y ago
  Lol. Microsoft came up with the silliest error messages. Seeing an interruption box "illegal operation detected" after running traceroute as a kid... was a jarring experience. I think I "yahoo'd" something about how much trouble I was in.
  - fcoury 4y ago
    That’s pretty funny as well! Made me remember when my friend’s father got this spanking new PC XT and I was super excited to play with it, since I only had an MSX computer back home. I started playing with all sorts of different commands and I remember I found this one called TREE.COM. I ran it and minutes after the computer took a crap. I was desperate with his father confronting me asking if I had done something bad and after a lot of pressure I confessed I ran TREE.COM and he thought that is what killed the computer. It was eventually reformatted and got back to operating fine but it took me YEARS to figure out the dreaded TREE.COM command had nothing to do with it :-) Anyways thanks for sharing!
  - hulitu 4y ago
    The best one "This application has violated system integrity and must be terminated."
- rmason 4y ago
jasim 4y ago
This is a history of dBase, not FoxPro. Wayne Ratliff, in the late 70s, built a revolutionary piece of tech: a high-level memory-managed language that regular people could use (from early 80s!) to build database-backed user interfaces. That was dBase. It is the greatest NoCode tool of all times. The best release of dBase was dBase III Plus. Everything that came after was a trash-fire. dBase was interpreted - you needed the source .PRG to run it. So a couple of folks formed Nantucket and built Clipper Summer 87. It was primarily marketed as a compiler for dBase. But later versions of Clipper became their own language, and remains my most favorite programming language. In parallel, there was FoxBase, originally a cheaper and then faster version of dBase, which was then turned to FoxPro with its separate command window and output window (thanks to a port to the original Mac GUI which necessitated it). Excellent product, extremely wide adoption for building business applications until FoxPro 2.6 for DOS. For a detailed history of FoxPro, read FoxTales by Kerry Nietz. Anyone who's used dBase/Clipper/FoxPro would find it deeply enjoyable!
- As_You_Wish 4y ago
  Foxpro was my jam. never liked anything but Foxpro, before or since.
- bananaboy 4y ago
  FoxTales was a really great read! I loved it and I only ever tinkered with dBase and never used Clipper or FoxPro.
- jim_lawless 4y ago
  I was confused by this too. The blog is called The History of FoxPro. The Ratliff interview is just one post of a number in the pre-history of FoxPro detailing the rise of dBase. Many of the others pertain to FoxPro. http://www.foxprohistory.org/tableofcontents.htm http://www.foxprohistory.org/tableofcontents.htm I agree with you about the FoxTales book. It was a great read.
- tandr 4y ago
  Thank you kindly for the trip down memory lane, that's how I remember it all too! That's what I started from - dBase III, Clipper, and then FoxPro, and always thought it was some sort on niche products. Nowadays I don't even mention these names on my resume...
z9znz 4y ago
So much tldr; I can't say what the biggest successes were of Foxpro, but for better or mostly worse, I was exposed to a use of Foxpro which brought a few hundred millions of revenue (and 20%ish percent of profits) based on it. There was a multi-level-marketing company based out of the Dallas-Fort-Worth area of Texas in the mid 1990s which sold 1/10th ounce gold coins in a pyramid-ish scheme that rose to significant fame in the "home business (MLM)" market. The compensation scheme was legit in that it operated as advertised. And indeed it made some marketing types very wealthy. The entire backend, as it was in those days, was based on Foxpro running on a Windows PC. I recall with amusement that the leader of that company invited me to review his binary tree calculion system to try to improve it. Foxpro wasn't actually the problem. The problem was a grossly inefficient linear system which couldn't manage binary structures with hundreds of braches and thousands of leaves. To be fair, this system was built buy a guy who was a used car salesman with no formal training. What he accomplished was astonishing, but it was also an abomination.
dang 4y ago
Related: Interview with Wayne Ratliff, author of dBASE (1986) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22382346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22382346 - Feb 2020 (16 comments)
RP_Joe 4y ago
Foxpro was a fantastic product until Microsoft killed it.
rmason 4y ago
My favorite story about Wayne Ratliff is what happened to Ashton-Tate after George Tate had a sudden heart attack and died. They hired a hot shot software marketing guy called Ed Esber. George Tate realized he wasn't a software developer and cut Ratliff and his team wide slack although he'd make suggestions sometimes based on his learnings with customers. Ed Esber was a bit more arrogant and saw Ratliff and his crew as nothing more than mere employees. Esber famously told Wayne Ratliff that he was no more important to the company than the people loading the trucks! Ratliff quit and started a competitor. It was the beginning of the end for Ashton-Tate. Ratliff created a new product that competed with dBase. In many ways it was a superior product but he couldn't market his way out of a paper bag. Meanwhile another competitor out of Perrysburg, Ohio had much more success in the dBase market and was later acquired by Microsoft.
gareth5851 4y ago
I love this. The sequence of technical changes was so human, fragile, unpredictable. I was at the beginning of my career in software at this time. It is a short time ago. Is the trajectory of software exponential? Depends on the humans involved, methinks.
blackoil 4y ago
Foxpro, DBase and Access were such a high productivity tools. I created a highly functional Retail POS in Access in ~12 work-hours. I would like something similar for web also.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Outsystems would be an example, in regards to productivity, however their target market is the enterprise space. Maybe Microsoft's PowerApps are more in line with that target market.
seesaw 4y ago
Wordstar, Dbase III Plus and Lotus 1-2-3, along with MS-DOS were my gateway to the computer world. I suspect this must be the case for a lot of kids growing up around that time.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Add Turbo Basic, Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, Turbo C++, QuickBasic to it. During highschool for the computing classes I had a high density floppy (whopping 1.4 MB!) with a custom installation of MS-DOS 3.3, TP, Q editor, TASM and maybe a few other utilities. Basically the minimum for a quick coding session on the computer lab.
ksec 4y ago
It is unfortunate all the modern IT and Tech is going backwards. Making moat around all the toolings and a huge barrier to simple CRUD apps which easily represent 80-90% of all business use cases. There are still millions of SME relying on Visual FoxPro, which had its last release 14 years ago.

105 points by susam 4y ago

It's a little known fact that the author has a fursona known as 'Barky J. Redtail', and was instrumental in founding some of the early furry communities in Ohio.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

beachy 4y ago

Like turbo pascal, a radically easy to use technology that was wildly successful at the time, but sank without trace in a few years as fashions shifted.

jslakro 4y ago
Probably one of the first low code tools in history. Still know solid companies built on top of fox pro solutions, gaining lot of money with simple UIs and BDs

yread 4y ago

I learnt programming with FoxPro. It had so many strange things. To print you just started the line with ? (box drawing and asterisks were used all the time). True and false constants werd .T. and .F.. I used the el editor to write it. Learning vi afterwards felt like such an upgrade

chrisseaton 4y ago

Wow the adverts on this site are intense. Sometimes I wonder if people set up adverts on their own site, but use and ad-blocker themselves and have no idea what the advert script now does to their pages.

keyle 4y ago

Ah foxpro. That was a great interview around dbase (EDIT: foxpro does not build on top of dbase I was wrong). I played around a lot with dbase in my early days. It was very cool. I never felt out of my league. I've seen some of the ugliest yet most functional software done in foxpro. Incredibly easy to build feature rich software that unfortunately looked like dog poop. Which has let them to either profit enough for a modern rewrite in .net, or disappear. Most of the shops that moved to .net highly missed how productive they were with tiny teams in foxpro, and how expensive the move to .net had been. If only foxpro had remained a viable option similar to VB, history might have gone a different way. You have to respect how productive people were in those time. We really took a dive. Budgets blew up, so did team sizes, and here we are. Stacks like foxpro and dbase allowed people like my uncle in his basement to start a massive business, or maintain the list of shirts he sent to the dry cleaners.

tpmx 4y ago
> I've seen some of the ugliest yet most functional software done in this. Incredibly easy to build feature rich software that unfortunately looked like dog poop. Can you find any screenshots to illustrate this? I'm curious about how you make the IBM PC 80x25 text screen look like poop. :)
- keyle 4y ago
  When your product looked like this, it was really hard to compete against new products coming to windows with winform https://winworldpc.com/res/img/screenshots/2x-841fe628c2d754d58f53be733811c3c1-Foxpro%202.0%20-%20Screen.png https://winworldpc.com/res/img/screenshots/2x-841fe628c2d754... vs. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/desktop/winforms/advanced/media/walkthrough-creating-an-accessible-windows-based-application/visual-basic-pizza-order-form.gif?view=netframeworkdesktop-4.8 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/desktop/winforms/adv...
  - kjellsbells 4y ago
    I dont disagree with you for the era that such comparisons were made, say 1995. But in retrospect I wonder if the kind of people who used these very specific line of business apps were more productive in the gui or the text mode where theyd probably memorized the key sequences by the end of their third day.

kstrauser 4y ago

My Internet claim to fame was writing a program to get people off of FoxPro to PostgreSQL: https://github.com/kstrauser/pgdbf https://github.com/kstrauser/pgdbf FoxPro was nifty in many ways, but nightmarish outside the “single person running the app with the database on their local hard drive” setup. The moment you tried to put the database files on a file share (which is how you used it as a network DB), it was a world of locking pain. And a fun fact: the client libraries were single threaded to the point that you could only run one query at a time per machine. If you had 2 apps running at once, only one of them could be querying at any given time.

As_You_Wish 4y ago
No.....there were commands that could be given that made it all run fine. That was 20+ years ago so I forget what it was.
jiggawatts 4y ago
It's staggeringly difficult to even just back it up safely if it is in use 24/7. We had some customers that made their FoxPro app "too critical" to the business, which very rapidly becomes an untenable nightmare with no way out.
blihp 4y ago
The default behavior made it multi-user unfriendly. A lot of that likely came from trying to remain dBase compatible and beginner friendly. It was actually one of the better (behaved and performing) multi-user DOS and early Windows databases I used that wasn't based on a client/server architecture. It was up to the developer to take care to avoid unnecessary locking. For example, you could open databases in read only mode, avoid locking when browsing via 'browse nomodify', don't lock the database until you actually needed to do your CRUD work etc. If you migrated apps to utilize SQL and other 'modern' (at the time) FoxPro features instead of the legacy FoxBase/dBase syntax much of this was taken care of for you. I had production databases with up to 100 concurrent users before the overhead of the locking mechanism really started to be a problem. (which back in the NetWare days was more than enough for many mid-sized business applications) Just by way of comparison, I saw lots of 'what the hell were they thinking?' multi-user MS Access deployments starting in the late 90's that were even worse... without the ability to mitigate the way FoxPro apps could. That said, of course client/server databases still scaled better, farther and easier.

triceratopz 4y ago

The productivity of FoxPro has never been equaled in any software since.

As_You_Wish 4y ago
Yep. I don't understand why at least new technologies don't imitate it. Seems so logical.
xuesj 4y ago
I agree with the point. I used Dbase III before using foxpro which help me a lot.

neilv 4y ago

Some of my childhood consulting was in dBase II and III+, and bought a copy of the compatible FoxBase+, to deliver my own database apps to clients who didn't already have dBase. (I also did at least one point-of-sale system using Turbo Database Toolbox.) There are a lot of resemblances of CRUD Web/app programming to 1980s PC database applications. Including things like many people using high-level frameworks/DSLs/painters for forms and reports, and sometimes getting much better results by being able to write code at a lower level. Pretty much all the coding we do today could be learned by a 12-year-old. (Product/project/politics experience takes longer, and judgment hasn't fully leveled up yet.)

fcoury 4y ago

The first language I used professionally was CA-Clipper Summer 87 vesion, which shared many of the dBase and FoxPro characteristics. The company I worked for had this full ERP solution that had many modules, Finances being one if them. I remember we had DBF and NTX files for indexes and you needed to run a reindexing procedure every morning before all the employees would start using the system. Once we got a support call claiming one of the users of such module was freaking out because the system was falsely accusing her. Upon asking for more details we found that the system would stop with the very particular message of “corruption detected” :) The ultimate fix was to ask everybody to logout and run the reindexing procedure, as always. But this funny story always stuck with me.

throwthere 4y ago
Lol. Microsoft came up with the silliest error messages. Seeing an interruption box "illegal operation detected" after running traceroute as a kid... was a jarring experience. I think I "yahoo'd" something about how much trouble I was in.
- fcoury 4y ago
  That’s pretty funny as well! Made me remember when my friend’s father got this spanking new PC XT and I was super excited to play with it, since I only had an MSX computer back home. I started playing with all sorts of different commands and I remember I found this one called TREE.COM. I ran it and minutes after the computer took a crap. I was desperate with his father confronting me asking if I had done something bad and after a lot of pressure I confessed I ran TREE.COM and he thought that is what killed the computer. It was eventually reformatted and got back to operating fine but it took me YEARS to figure out the dreaded TREE.COM command had nothing to do with it :-) Anyways thanks for sharing!
- hulitu 4y ago
  The best one "This application has violated system integrity and must be terminated."
rmason 4y ago

jasim 4y ago

This is a history of dBase, not FoxPro. Wayne Ratliff, in the late 70s, built a revolutionary piece of tech: a high-level memory-managed language that regular people could use (from early 80s!) to build database-backed user interfaces. That was dBase. It is the greatest NoCode tool of all times. The best release of dBase was dBase III Plus. Everything that came after was a trash-fire. dBase was interpreted - you needed the source .PRG to run it. So a couple of folks formed Nantucket and built Clipper Summer 87. It was primarily marketed as a compiler for dBase. But later versions of Clipper became their own language, and remains my most favorite programming language. In parallel, there was FoxBase, originally a cheaper and then faster version of dBase, which was then turned to FoxPro with its separate command window and output window (thanks to a port to the original Mac GUI which necessitated it). Excellent product, extremely wide adoption for building business applications until FoxPro 2.6 for DOS. For a detailed history of FoxPro, read FoxTales by Kerry Nietz. Anyone who's used dBase/Clipper/FoxPro would find it deeply enjoyable!

As_You_Wish 4y ago
Foxpro was my jam. never liked anything but Foxpro, before or since.
bananaboy 4y ago
FoxTales was a really great read! I loved it and I only ever tinkered with dBase and never used Clipper or FoxPro.
jim_lawless 4y ago
I was confused by this too. The blog is called The History of FoxPro. The Ratliff interview is just one post of a number in the pre-history of FoxPro detailing the rise of dBase. Many of the others pertain to FoxPro. http://www.foxprohistory.org/tableofcontents.htm http://www.foxprohistory.org/tableofcontents.htm I agree with you about the FoxTales book. It was a great read.
tandr 4y ago
Thank you kindly for the trip down memory lane, that's how I remember it all too! That's what I started from - dBase III, Clipper, and then FoxPro, and always thought it was some sort on niche products. Nowadays I don't even mention these names on my resume...

z9znz 4y ago

So much tldr; I can't say what the biggest successes were of Foxpro, but for better or mostly worse, I was exposed to a use of Foxpro which brought a few hundred millions of revenue (and 20%ish percent of profits) based on it. There was a multi-level-marketing company based out of the Dallas-Fort-Worth area of Texas in the mid 1990s which sold 1/10th ounce gold coins in a pyramid-ish scheme that rose to significant fame in the "home business (MLM)" market. The compensation scheme was legit in that it operated as advertised. And indeed it made some marketing types very wealthy. The entire backend, as it was in those days, was based on Foxpro running on a Windows PC. I recall with amusement that the leader of that company invited me to review his binary tree calculion system to try to improve it. Foxpro wasn't actually the problem. The problem was a grossly inefficient linear system which couldn't manage binary structures with hundreds of braches and thousands of leaves. To be fair, this system was built buy a guy who was a used car salesman with no formal training. What he accomplished was astonishing, but it was also an abomination.

dang 4y ago

Related: Interview with Wayne Ratliff, author of dBASE (1986) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22382346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22382346 - Feb 2020 (16 comments)

RP_Joe 4y ago

Foxpro was a fantastic product until Microsoft killed it.

rmason 4y ago

My favorite story about Wayne Ratliff is what happened to Ashton-Tate after George Tate had a sudden heart attack and died. They hired a hot shot software marketing guy called Ed Esber. George Tate realized he wasn't a software developer and cut Ratliff and his team wide slack although he'd make suggestions sometimes based on his learnings with customers. Ed Esber was a bit more arrogant and saw Ratliff and his crew as nothing more than mere employees. Esber famously told Wayne Ratliff that he was no more important to the company than the people loading the trucks! Ratliff quit and started a competitor. It was the beginning of the end for Ashton-Tate. Ratliff created a new product that competed with dBase. In many ways it was a superior product but he couldn't market his way out of a paper bag. Meanwhile another competitor out of Perrysburg, Ohio had much more success in the dBase market and was later acquired by Microsoft.

gareth5851 4y ago

I love this. The sequence of technical changes was so human, fragile, unpredictable. I was at the beginning of my career in software at this time. It is a short time ago. Is the trajectory of software exponential? Depends on the humans involved, methinks.

blackoil 4y ago

Foxpro, DBase and Access were such a high productivity tools. I created a highly functional Retail POS in Access in ~12 work-hours. I would like something similar for web also.

pjmlp 4y ago
Outsystems would be an example, in regards to productivity, however their target market is the enterprise space. Maybe Microsoft's PowerApps are more in line with that target market.

seesaw 4y ago

Wordstar, Dbase III Plus and Lotus 1-2-3, along with MS-DOS were my gateway to the computer world. I suspect this must be the case for a lot of kids growing up around that time.

pjmlp 4y ago
Add Turbo Basic, Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, Turbo C++, QuickBasic to it. During highschool for the computing classes I had a high density floppy (whopping 1.4 MB!) with a custom installation of MS-DOS 3.3, TP, Q editor, TASM and maybe a few other utilities. Basically the minimum for a quick coding session on the computer lab.

ksec 4y ago

It is unfortunate all the modern IT and Tech is going backwards. Making moat around all the toolings and a huge barrier to simple CRUD apps which easily represent 80-90% of all business use cases. There are still millions of SME relying on Visual FoxPro, which had its last release 14 years ago.