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by dunham 2993 days ago
Way back in the day, "DabbleDB" was written in Smalltalk. (It was a Zenkit/Airtable type web app.)

If I remember right, they had a separate image per customer and it took a moment to bring up the VM if hadn't been to the site in a while.

1 comments

Sadly they got acqu-hired by twitter - and judging by some (not bad, just in lack of enthusiasm) comments, I got a sense that they sold dabbledb at peak technical/architectural debt...

It's a bit sad, I appeared to be a Google sheets meets office 365 flows on steroids before either was any good:

https://youtu.be/6wZmYMWKLkY

(i think that's from 2006 or so, archive.org has more info, but it's a bit painful to navigate on mobile)

Avi Bryant comments on hn from time to time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=avibryant

As I understand it, each customer got an image/vm - and data was just stored as Smalltalk objects. It'd been interesting to see where they might have gone if they coupled the dabbledb front end with gemstone/s.