[yardshop]

My first few programming jobs were in dBASE, the last of which saw the use of dBASE go on for 15 years or so. It was a weird language but still capable of quite a lot. I learned some assembly language with the help of Peter Norton and had a few neat little addons for my dBASE code.

I tried to transition my company to Borland dBASE 5 when it came out but there was too much to try to upgrade all at once. I was really excited about a lot of the language improvements, and the fact that it was now coming from a real language company, but it was too much too late. A few years later my company moved to different software altogether and dBASE was just a (mostly) fond memory.

My most productive use of it was with the Topaz library for Turbo Pascal from Software Science. They provided a much more powerful UI capability than one could get from "@ 1,1 say ..." with drop down lists and moveable windows etc. It was still all character mode DOS stuff, but we had the whole menagerie running in Windows for Workgroups for a good while. Those were fun days.

[chasil]

I was actually tasked with pulling a customer list out of dBASE 2 on CP/M that had 8" floppy disks (in addition to the hard drive).

I managed to do it by configuring the serial port as the printer, at 9600/n/8/1.

I used a null modem into my laptop, and captured the output with Procomm.

Fun times.

[yardshop]

Ha, funny! I did something very similar when we moved from old NEC APCs with 8" floppies to brand new IBM PC XTs and ATs! The consultants wanted something like $200 per disk to convert them. I was able to rig up a serial cable and a tiny Turbo Pascal program to send files from one machine to another. A couple cheap cable ends from Radio Shack and some spare phone wire from the basement was all it needed!

The serial printer port trick is very clever too. I don't think my transfer was as fast as 9600. Good job!

[chasil]

Thanks!

"The consultants wanted something like $200 per disk to convert them."

As P.T. Barnum said, there's a sucker born every minute. Your coworkers hopefully thanked you for letting that be the next guy.

Edit: he might not have said it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_sucker_born_ever...