[crag]

I have a friend in NYC who makes a VERY nice living maintaining COBOL on mainframes. It's a niche market, so very few guys around who not only can read and write COBOL but also work on the mainframe.

I pretty much do what he does except with xbase (dbase, foxbase/pro and clipper) on PC's. There are millions of lines of code written in the 90's still happily running.

In fact, the only "tech" I see from the 90's that's pretty much dead and buried is Netware and Vines.

Damn shame too, cause I loved Netware. Ol'well. :)

We're both old farts, compared to most of you guys. He's 64 and I'm 55.

[lakkal]

Nice. I'm almost 52 and still work on the FoxPro application I started working on in 1987, which was originally in dBase II, then moved to FoxBase+, then to FP DOS and now VFP. Now, 32 years later, it's finally being phased out - to move our data into an application written in RPG :-).

[crag]

I remember when MS brought out Fox. I was in Toledo at Fox's annual dev's conference (they were based in Toledo). I remember making a bet between a bunch of us [Fox dev's) how long it would take for MS to drop FP. I lost. Was off by a few years.

But I do remember MS pushing Access (which was and probably still is utter trash, compared to FP). And then VB6. I hate VB. I have nothing against the language itself. I'm just still bitter at MS replacing FP with VB.

I am involved in a project that is replacing FP with Python. Now Python I like a lot.

[lakkal]

I never made it to any of the developer conferences, but I remember the mood on the Fox forum on Compu$erve being very grim when the announcement was made. People joked about jumping out of windows...

I'm no fan of Access or VB, either. I do everything outside the main application in Python, too.