I feel the timeline is wrong re when dBase Inc took over. I remember working as a consultant on shipping new features for dBase back in 2000 or so.

I implemented reflection for the dBase language and was also part of trying to convert it to Visual C++ instead of using the Borland compiler. I was very green back then but it was interesting, my only time dealing with interpreters / compilers

In 1998 I wrote a financial summary for our ERP system (EUROnet) running on MS DOS with a dBase db in the backend. I've connected the dBase to a PHP 3 web server with Apache 1 and then summarized the sales data. My boss loved it. He could see numbers which are not implemented in the ERP reports.

Fascinating obituary for dBase; software history repeats through neglect, litigation, complacency.

My first gig at 18 was managing my university library's database (in dBase III; it was the 1980s) and writing the user interfaces for searching. This was a pre-SQL database for you youngins in case you have no idea what I'm talking about.

The dbase.com domain now appears to be down too.

What the article describes doesn't apply to those who migrated already to FoxPro (and/or Harbour), yes?

One of my first sizeable projects was a COM-compatible compiled language with .dbf support primitives for data transformation. As a unique quirk, it could even work on Novel Netware to interface with Btrieve.

Netware supported loading PE executables, but it lacked memory protection so developing for it was... fun.

The .dbf format was pretty straightforward, though.