alt Hacker NewsDBASE on the Kaypro II
Comments
This blog is so much fun to read. Super well written and researched, and it definitely scratches an itch for me. A lot of these tools seemed boring and mysterious to me when I was growing up, but seeing that these tools were actually already really powerful considering the hardware they're running on is very interesting.
> MAME has no printer emulation, which I like to use for a more holistic retro computing experience.
That's wrong. I haven't tried it with the Kaypro emulation, but here's a video showing the mc68000 computer printing to an emulated Epson ActionPrinter 2000: https://streamable.com/rvenyx
It's also possible to print to a text file.
>> The prompt starts at the first field and <RETURN> (not <TAB> !) moves to the next.
This is hilarious to me, because times have certainly changed.
When we first started shipping Windows software the big complaint from users was the use of Tab to switch fields, while Return triggered the default button (usually Save or Close).
The change, for users used to DOS was painful - not least when capturing numbers as the numeric key pad has Enter not Tab.
Software developers either stood firm, convincing customers to learn Tab, or caved and aliased the Enter key to the Tab key. Even today I still find that option here and there in Software that's been around a while...
It wasn't quite as old, but there was an old MS DOS database system called Cosmos Revelation that was sort of a proto-nosql/graph database used keys and values for records, with the values being stored in long strings that contained field separators, and support for multiple values of the same time in a single field of a record. It used a language called R/BASIC that had library routines to help you work with the data structure.
This software is my retro computing white whale, I've never been able to find it. But I think it's evolved into a product called OpenInsight, by Revelation Software, which still exists.
I note that Clarion is still being developed, version 12 was released last year. I remember fondly using its screen designer to create drop-shadowed dialogs.
In a moment of serendipity, I was about 30 minutes into watching this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYU3CQomE5M
I had memories of Foxpro and Clipper on my mind, when I found myself in this rabbit hole.
This is awesome. Loved the training video as well.
It’s kind of cool to see people putting in the effort to learn 30 commands and becoming masters of their own destiny. I guess it’s the same sense of mastery that Excel users have today.
What’s the dBase II/III equivalent today?
According to users of the Kaypro II from that time, it was a very robust machine. It was even used on the 1984 Paris Dakar edition.
I have the source code to fox pro on a tape in my garage someplace
Love the guy trying to crush his red telephone handset in the CP/M-86 ad. I assume he’s just been told he has to reenter the Kermit assembler code and start again.
My introduction to databases was via dBASE III Plus, shortly followed by Clipper Summer '87, and Clipper 5.x (already OOP and some C++ like constructs).
The change to VB/Access and SQL later on took some mind shifting as the concepts on how to design a database are quite different.
Additionally it is quite remarkable the productivity that xBase offered, for a constrained environment like MS-DOS, in an automatic memory managed language, with AOT compilation (when using Clipper, FoxPro and co).