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Bill wrote: "Heard this all before? Was this a letter about IBM and RPG? Nope, it's about Visual FoxPro and Microsoft." Gee, Microsoft killing off Foxpro with benign neglect? Do you know the story behind Microsoft and Foxpro, Bill? (I guess you do, you get an industry newsletter 
Foxpro was kicking the crap out of an amatuerish effort from Microsoft called Access, along with having a database language that was not helping Bill Gate's Basic efforts any. (I used Microsoft Basic and MASM in 1984-1986 to write my own database and network software that was the basis of the original Melita Electronics products which I also wrote, first for schools and cable companies but then an emergency notification system for nuclear plants that I first installed on a 4.77Mhz XT at Shoreham nuclear plant on Long Island, which finally satisfied the NRC enough to give LILO permission to fire up the plant, no small task given the fear on Long Island of a meltdown - mmmm, Basic on a 4.77 Mhz PC... imagine what we could do with Java on a 1.5 Ghz Pentium - but I digress - so I certainly have nothing against Basic). M$ liked Foxpro so much it bought the company, or to put it another way, Foxpro devised a bit mapped indexing scheme (Rushmore, I think) that would have left M$ in the dust, so they offered the founder so much he couldn't refuse. He was then pigeonholed in Redmond until he finally left and went home. M$ lifted the database engine, named it Jet and gave it to Access, put all their marbles in Visual Basic, and then sold Visual Foxpro to whoever was left that wanted to buy it. Gee, and they don't market it. Imagine that. While I'm in here, and speaking of marketing, IBM has a Linux package of Websphere, Domino, DB/2, and MQSeries which they say is free. I suppose this would allow an AS/400 shop to run all that software in a Linux partition on an iSeries. Maybe IBM likes that. I don't know. Ralph
Foxpro was kicking the crap out of an amatuerish effort from Microsoft called Access, along with having a database language that was not helping Bill Gate's Basic efforts any. (I used Microsoft Basic and MASM in 1984-1986 to write my own database and network software that was the basis of the original Melita Electronics products which I also wrote, first for schools and cable companies but then an emergency notification system for nuclear plants that I first installed on a 4.77Mhz XT at Shoreham nuclear plant on Long Island, which finally satisfied the NRC enough to give LILO permission to fire up the plant, no small task given the fear on Long Island of a meltdown - mmmm, Basic on a 4.77 Mhz PC... imagine what we could do with Java on a 1.5 Ghz Pentium - but I digress - so I certainly have nothing against Basic). M$ liked Foxpro so much it bought the company, or to put it another way, Foxpro devised a bit mapped indexing scheme (Rushmore, I think) that would have left M$ in the dust, so they offered the founder so much he couldn't refuse. He was then pigeonholed in Redmond until he finally left and went home. M$ lifted the database engine, named it Jet and gave it to Access, put all their marbles in Visual Basic, and then sold Visual Foxpro to whoever was left that wanted to buy it. Gee, and they don't market it. Imagine that. While I'm in here, and speaking of marketing, IBM has a Linux package of Websphere, Domino, DB/2, and MQSeries which they say is free. I suppose this would allow an AS/400 shop to run all that software in a Linux partition on an iSeries. Maybe IBM likes that. I don't know. Ralph
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