Related but off-topic: Nothing I see today compares to the productivity that I saw with Lotus Notes, Dbase 3 and 4, Paradox, Microsoft Access, Foxpro, and a fe

Related but off-topic: Nothing I see today compares to the productivity that I saw with Lotus Notes, Dbase 3 and 4, Paradox, Microsoft Access, Foxpro, and a few other things from that era. There are some really good SAAS offerings that target this space (e.g. Airtable), but none of them seem as dominant as I would expect. There was a time that if you wanted a simple application that could be covered with 3-4 tables and 5-6 views, any of the things I mentioned above could handle it. You could explain the business problem and hand a developer a book on any of the above technologies and expect to have a working product a month later. Today, this isn't really true. It does seem we've gone backwards a bit...