I remember those times well, particularly all the clones - i.e. Foxpro. Dbase was a great idea but I sure hated the language used. Paradox and Access were clearly superior.
We've really kind of "lost" the end-user database. I played with an older version of Access and was blown away by how user-friendly and capable it was compared to just doing things in spreadsheets.
Losing Access and similar things has lead to Salesforce being a billion dollar company; when it's basically AccessOnline™.
I used to work at a bike shop where they went 100% Apple products. All the POS machines were macs. The entire company was mainly run with Filemaker Pro, which is pretty impressive when you think at the time, the company had over 10 shops.
They had one IT guy that managed everything and I remember him saying it was either going to be Apple or some Linux distro and by using Apple for all their stuff, it greatly reduced the amount spent on tons of other IT stuff that he would have to deal with if it were Windows based.
It's still around, but do you ever hear of anyone using it? For some reason that style of ui has fallen out of favor. I have fond memories of FileMaker.
Access was powerful and dominated the market for a while but there were two problems: 1) it was kind of bad from a pure dev perspective compared to SQL Server b) non-pure devs made horrible broken apps and eventually ended up calling in the pure devs, who moved them to SQL Server.
Not only that, but JET (the database engine) also integrated into Visual Basic and C++. I was using MDBs in applications long before SQLite3 became a thing.
This. Access is a very powerful package to quickly slap down a structured data model with data entry forms and report generators. The benefit is that it automatically guarantees consistency in data entry and processing. Spreadsheets are notoriously bad at enforcing structure.
Yeah - people basically had entire applications written in Access - think very simple point-of-sale systems, record keeping tools etc. The downside of course, is that, it ran on a single computer and there wasn't a concept of multi-user systems (or maybe there was and I just wasn't aware of it).
In some ways, it's a hark back to the day of a really 'thick' client that was a server, middleware and client all in one.
Access scales from being a one process all-in-one solution to multiple processes sharing the same database file and also to a separate ODBC-connected database engine with Access as a frontend. At least some 20 years ago, there was an assistant to automatically migrate an Access database to a split Access/SQL Server setup.
If I had to throw together a reasonably robust data entry form in a time crunch today and could connect to the DB engine via ODBC, I'd probably still use Access for that.
My first paid programming jobs were writing Clipper applications for small businesses around the city I lived in. I have very fond memories of the work, the people, and the equipment I worked on (XT clone with a floppy drive then after I made some money, an AT clone with a 20 MB hard drive).
Losing Access and similar things has lead to Salesforce being a billion dollar company; when it's basically AccessOnline™.