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One of my favourite DB systems, started with dBase III+ where our teacher made us enter the high-school library records, followed up with Clipper Summer '87, an

by pjmlp 6mo ago

One of my favourite DB systems, started with dBase III+ where our teacher made us enter the high-school library records, followed up with Clipper Summer '87, and shortly thereafter Clipper 5.x with its OOP extensions. Great productivity tool, garbage collected, compiled, in the constrained environment of MS-DOS PCs. The migration to Windows 3.1 took too much time, giving time to FoxPro, Access, Visual Basic and Delphi to establish themselves to the same programming communities. Similar to other HNers, Clipper was also how I made my first attempts to working for others during high school.

vasac 6mo ago
Ah, Clipper was a major force in the late ’80s in Yugoslavia, as economic reforms enabled the widespread establishment of private companies that needed accounting software, and PCs became cheap enough for one-person shops to develop custom accounting solutions. It was the Wild West for a few years, with a zillion different applications, until some bigger players emerged. IIRC, it needed one or two 360K floppies for a full install (a pirated copy; maybe the legal distribution was larger - at that time, all software was pirated). Compiling was fast (on a computer where you type dir and can read the filenames appearing on the screen faster than the computer can print them), but linking was slow, so everyone replaced MS Link with Borland’s TurboLink, which was an order of magnitude faster. It didn’t support overlays, but there were ways to work around that. There was also documentation available in some third-party TSR app. Later, another linker became popular: Blinker, which had a bunch of interesting features, such as loading overlays into EMS memory and providing various security functions to help protect your software. But by that time, the writing was already on the wall for DOS. Funnily enough, many customers actually preferred DOS, since navigating with the keyboard was far faster than using a mouse, and Windows apps generally weren’t designed with keyboard navigation in mind.
- pjmlp 6mo ago
  Ah, Blinker! Never used it, but remeber the ads in magazines. Same in Iberian penisula regarding software acquisition, even during university, the same copy centers for books, also offered catalogs of which software we would like to have, or street baazars even, only in the 2000's the goverment (in Portugal) actually started hunting down those practices.

by pjmlp 6mo ago

vasac 6mo ago

Ah, Clipper was a major force in the late ’80s in Yugoslavia, as economic reforms enabled the widespread establishment of private companies that needed accounting software, and PCs became cheap enough for one-person shops to develop custom accounting solutions. It was the Wild West for a few years, with a zillion different applications, until some bigger players emerged. IIRC, it needed one or two 360K floppies for a full install (a pirated copy; maybe the legal distribution was larger - at that time, all software was pirated). Compiling was fast (on a computer where you type dir and can read the filenames appearing on the screen faster than the computer can print them), but linking was slow, so everyone replaced MS Link with Borland’s TurboLink, which was an order of magnitude faster. It didn’t support overlays, but there were ways to work around that. There was also documentation available in some third-party TSR app. Later, another linker became popular: Blinker, which had a bunch of interesting features, such as loading overlays into EMS memory and providing various security functions to help protect your software. But by that time, the writing was already on the wall for DOS. Funnily enough, many customers actually preferred DOS, since navigating with the keyboard was far faster than using a mouse, and Windows apps generally weren’t designed with keyboard navigation in mind.

pjmlp 6mo ago
Ah, Blinker! Never used it, but remeber the ads in magazines. Same in Iberian penisula regarding software acquisition, even during university, the same copy centers for books, also offered catalogs of which software we would like to have, or street baazars even, only in the 2000's the goverment (in Portugal) actually started hunting down those practices.