dBase

And at the time, of course, we're battling everybody that's using Excel and Microsoft Access as their database front ends.

And, you know, heaven forbid, some Dbase and Lotus floating around out there.

And so the marketing company that we had worked with at the time, that's one of the things that they had recorded was there has to be a better way.

And that's how they were going to introduce us.

And central services, IT would never help them.

[laughs] And so he was the person on his Toshiba laptop, uh, you know, using dBase IV to solve all the frontline problems, right? And so, you know, he's a, he's a technologist, not classically trained like in computer science like many of us, but, I mean, he was without doubt helping solve problems on the front line, you know, for everything from, you know, uh, you know, that involve not one engine every 55...

not, not, not one completed car every 55 seconds, but, you know, high precision, you know, handcrafted, [laughs] beautifully designed engines, high performance.

Um, and, and, uh, I think with the vision you paint is, you know, how many Art Smalleys are there in the world, right, who are in manufacturing flows right now-

You built a database.

I built a card file first, then a Dbase file on a machine that took 8 minutes to boot, then eventually a little web thing.

But the point is, I've been maintaining a replacement table for plumbing fittings for 11 years.

It's got about 6,000 entries.

So this is sort of like the later personal geodatabases in that it's an off-the-shelf commercial database file written as a program called Vulkan to make winning office football pools easier, I'm reading here.

It was later rebranded as Dbase2.

with a 2 in his first version in the early 80s.

But by the time that shapefiles debuted in ArcView 2 in 95, Dbase was a mature technology owned by a company called Borland, which is a major software company.