[dpb001]

It was interesting to read some of the history and this was a fun era to live through for developing database applications where most of what you needed was contained in the database application itself. But I'll disagree that mismanagement was the primary cause of decline of systems such as dBase, FoxPro, and Paradox. By the late 80's they were all starting to show the strain of implementing multi-user access via some sort of file server hosting. Read consistency and transaction isolation is pretty hard to implement and I still remember how early versions of Paradox would simply restart a query executing on a workstation if another user updated a table. When things like PowerBuilder and the relatively inexpensive WATCOM SQL server arrived there was no turning back for anything other than simple applications.