It's been long enough that I have nothing but rose-colored affinity for the dBase III, FoxPro and CA Clipper apps that I used to work on. In the early days, my company looked at Harbour (https://harbour.github.io/) as a "quick way" to get some of our account payable systems onto the web back in the late 90s. In the end, a full rewrite with MySQL + Perl DBI was what we chose. I remember that being far more painful. I wonder if I'll have similar rose-colored appreciation for that stack in 20 years.
I have the same pair of glasses. My first paid programming work was dBASE II and later FoxPro. I don't look back on MySQL + Perl with the same affection. You could really get stuff done in those environments.
Tangentially related. Does any one remember a book on databases for kids from the early 90s? It came with a 5.25" floppy in the back with the database software for DOS. Ive been trying to remember what this book from my childhood was but I've been unsuccessful.
"As platforms and operating systems proliferated in the early 1980s, the company found it difficult to port the assembly language-based dBase to target systems. This led to a rewrite of the platform in the C programming language, using automated code conversion tools. The resulting code worked, but was essentially undocumented and inhuman in syntax due to the automated conversion, a problem that would prove to be serious in the future."
What a nice surprise. Two days ago I glanced a book about Clipper Summer in my bookshelf and thought that it would be nice to have an environment like that for the web. Glad that someone has built it!
By the way, I'm not nostalgic about the tech of those years, but I definitely think that we unlearned a few things along the way
One of the very cool things Fox allow us was to ship their ability to `CREATE FORM, CREATE REPORT, BROWSE, etc` so the users can customize the app with the same power as us. This is one of the most important advantages of ERPs and such made with Fox and is still unmatched.
But but... if the ERP allows the customer to do their own custom reports and forms... they won't pay you extra customization fees? Won't you think of the poor ERP vendors?
I built this because I missed the dot prompt. Before SQL and ORMs, you typed USE customers, then LIST, and your data was just there. WebBase-III is that whole world rebuilt from scratch as a web app: a W3Script interpreter (lexer, recursive-descent parser, async executor) in TypeScript, backed by Node, WebSockets and SQLite. BROWSE, @ SAY GET forms, .prg programs, indexes with SEEK, reports — it's all there.
One-click try (no install) via Codespaces: https://codespaces.new/DDecoene/WebBaseIII. Open port 5173 and you're at the dot prompt.
It's deliberately a toy (AGPL to keep it that way). Happy to answer anything about the interpreter or the dBASE quirks I had to decide whether to preserve — like the 10 work-area limit, which I dropped.
Gotta plug the delightful, 80s-core hour length ad for dBASE
https://youtu.be/bYU3CQomE5M?is=BysfXD3ybPme-DoL
Before my time, but fun to see how much could be done with it!
Delightful indeed. Brings back memories, thanks for sharing!
Gentry Lee is in this? That's very funny.
It's been long enough that I have nothing but rose-colored affinity for the dBase III, FoxPro and CA Clipper apps that I used to work on. In the early days, my company looked at Harbour (https://harbour.github.io/) as a "quick way" to get some of our account payable systems onto the web back in the late 90s. In the end, a full rewrite with MySQL + Perl DBI was what we chose. I remember that being far more painful. I wonder if I'll have similar rose-colored appreciation for that stack in 20 years.
I have the same pair of glasses. My first paid programming work was dBASE II and later FoxPro. I don't look back on MySQL + Perl with the same affection. You could really get stuff done in those environments.
Tangentially related. Does any one remember a book on databases for kids from the early 90s? It came with a 5.25" floppy in the back with the database software for DOS. Ive been trying to remember what this book from my childhood was but I've been unsuccessful.
"As platforms and operating systems proliferated in the early 1980s, the company found it difficult to port the assembly language-based dBase to target systems. This led to a rewrite of the platform in the C programming language, using automated code conversion tools. The resulting code worked, but was essentially undocumented and inhuman in syntax due to the automated conversion, a problem that would prove to be serious in the future."
Rewriting it with an LLM, is surprisingly apt.
What a nice surprise. Two days ago I glanced a book about Clipper Summer in my bookshelf and thought that it would be nice to have an environment like that for the web. Glad that someone has built it!
By the way, I'm not nostalgic about the tech of those years, but I definitely think that we unlearned a few things along the way
Cool!
I have this dream of revive this kind of spirit (https://tablam.org).
I started with Foxpro 2.6 and it was a blast.
One of the very cool things Fox allow us was to ship their ability to `CREATE FORM, CREATE REPORT, BROWSE, etc` so the users can customize the app with the same power as us. This is one of the most important advantages of ERPs and such made with Fox and is still unmatched.
But but... if the ERP allows the customer to do their own custom reports and forms... they won't pay you extra customization fees? Won't you think of the poor ERP vendors?
I used to be a consultant in what used to be Navision, now Microsoft Dynamics Nav. Go figure
Using dBase3 then Clipper, I wrote this music recommending system, back in 1997.
Here it is again, reborn using Claude Code, using modern tech (Cloudflare, D1, Workers/TypeScript, Pages):
The Similarities Engine
https://SimilaritiesEngine.com
>Sorry, we don't have any suggestions yet, for those 5. But you helped improve the system for the next visitor!
The albums if you're curious:
Amorphous Androgynous - The Isness - 2002-08-05
Boards of Canada - Music Has the Right to Children - 1998-04-20
Booka Shade - Eve - 2013-11-01
Orbital - Blue Album - 2004-06-21
Rone - Tohu Bohu - 2012-10-15
Haha :-) - FoxPro and Clipper next.
I built this because I missed the dot prompt. Before SQL and ORMs, you typed USE customers, then LIST, and your data was just there. WebBase-III is that whole world rebuilt from scratch as a web app: a W3Script interpreter (lexer, recursive-descent parser, async executor) in TypeScript, backed by Node, WebSockets and SQLite. BROWSE, @ SAY GET forms, .prg programs, indexes with SEEK, reports — it's all there. One-click try (no install) via Codespaces: https://codespaces.new/DDecoene/WebBaseIII. Open port 5173 and you're at the dot prompt. It's deliberately a toy (AGPL to keep it that way). Happy to answer anything about the interpreter or the dBASE quirks I had to decide whether to preserve — like the 10 work-area limit, which I dropped.