alt Hacker NewsMy father in law did database programming for small businesses using FoxPro. It was pretty cool, it created the executable and you could host it on any Windows file server IIRC. I think it also may have had some server functionality built in too. Anyways, it was fast if the database was designed correctly and allowed for easy setup at the clients offices. I think before that he was using a product called Clipper.
Yup, same story for me. Father-in-law owned a consulting business on the side. (CS Professor was his day job) His apps were CA Clipper, DB3, VB4-6, FoxPro, Turbo Pascal, Delphi. I worked for him for years in college. Doctors offices, dentist offices and an oil company. What a time to be in the programming gig! I migrated Novell servers and moved customers from Btrieve to PervasiveSQL. We got into open source pretty early (1998 - which one might argue wasn't THAT early). Some of our "next-gen" stuff used Perl:DBI, Python + MySQL, PHP3. I got such a crash course in cool tech.
The one thing I learned early on. MS-JET is NOT something you want to share from a server! Dbase dbf on the other hand, seemed to work fine.