|
|
|
| Fox Stories |
"The first edition of a FoxPro newsletter from the Boston Computer Society" (Eric den Doop)
This is the first edition of a Foxpro newsletter from the Boston
Computer Society. This newsletter is archived at ftp.rahul.net in the
directory pub/coneill under filename bcnn0294.zip. Future editions
(published monthly) will be archived there as they are published.
Information regarding subscriptions and contributions is located near
the end of the newsletter.
Please address any comments or suggestions regarding the newsletter
to lsquires@world.std.com.
Please address any comments or suggestions on Internet distribution of
this newsletter to kruckenb@peruvian.cs.utah.edu.
(Check the complete Newsletter)
"Recently, the Google search engine has added 20 years of archived usenet
posts to their search database. The oldest message related to
Fox/Foxbase that I could found is dated 09/09/1986." (Eric den Doop)
|
From: Ben Noordzij (benno@eurifb.UUCP_(benno)
Subject: experience with dBASEIII clones, anyone? Newsgroups: net.micro.pc Date: 1986-08-12 18:04:57 PST |
|
From: Gregg Thompson (greggt@ncoast.UUCP)
Subject: Re: experience with dBASEIII clones, anyone? Newsgroups: net.micro.pc Date: 1986-08-30 22:25:45 PST |
|
From: bob bookbinder (system@lamont.UUCP)
Subject: Lotus & dBASE lookalikes Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards Date: 1986-09-09 13:47:00 PST |
"First mention of David Fulton and FoxPro in Google" (Eric den Doop)
|
From: Michael C. Sanders (ms7u+@andrew.cmu.edu)
Subject: foxpro compatibility??? Newsgroups: comp.databases Date: 1989-10-09 11:43:26 PST |
|
From: Emuleomo (emuleomo@yes.rutgers.edu)
Subject: Re: foxpro compatibility??? Newsgroups: comp.databases Date: 1989-10-11 04:49:59 PST |
|
From: Cliff Joslyn (cjoslyn@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu)
Subject: Re: foxpro compatibility??? Newsgroups: comp.databases Date: 1989-10-11 18:12:19 PST |
|
From: Michael Silano (dat_48@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU)
Subject: Re: foxpro compatibility??? Newsgroups: comp.databases Date: 1989-10-11 22:24:07 PST |
=============================================================================== Michael Silano = Did you know that life is the weasel@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu = leading cause of death??? weasel@jhunix.BITNET ====================================== ===============================================================================
|
From: Alexis Rosen (alexis@panix.UUCP)
Subject: Re: foxpro compatibility??? Newsgroups: comp.databases Date: 1989-10-12 01:55:03 PST |
|
From: BRIAN LOESGEN (brian.loesgen@canremote.uucp)
Subject: Re: foxpro compatibility??? Newsgroups: comp.databases Date: 1989-10-16 06:53:00 PST |
"How to Win The FoxPro Puzzle"
George Tasker and Carl Warner
 |
Among the "Easter eggs" that could be found in FoxPro, there is one related to the Puzzle (from the System menu pad, choose "Puzzle").
|
"Is this David Fulton, FoxPro's David Fulton?"
As a response to a message (Thread #596617) posted in The Universal Thread by Fernando Alvares:
Searching for information about Dave and Amy Fulton, found:
Are Dave and Amy Fulton concert players or I'm lost in the dust? It's very hard to find information about them. Can you believe that?
Doug Hennig: I can't say for certain that it's them, but I'd bet money on it. They've always been very involved in the arts, especially symphonies.
Doug Dodge: Yep.. That's them. Dave & Amy are very involved with music, partuicularly chamber music in the Seattle area.
Craig Berntson: I'll bet money on it too. Last I heard they were heavily involved with the Seattle Symphony and related organizations.
David Bower: That's fits in with what I remember of them at the early Toledo devcons. They seem to always have some classy musical act arranged. It makes me very happy to see them so involved. Wonderful people.
Bret Empie: I vaguely remember an old thread saying that he collected old violins, or something. It might not lead to much, but you might search his name here, since you are a Premier Universal Thread Membership.
Charles Hankey: Dr. Dave owns a 1737 Guarneri del Gesu known as "Viconte de Panette" that was previously owned by Isaac Stern. Fulton bought the instrument in 1994 (he must have come into some money about that time < bg > as the price of this level instument often runs into the millions ). In 1996, Vadim Repin recorded the Ravel and Medtner sonatas on this instrument, which was lent to him by Dr. Dave.
Fulton plays the violin himself, but this kind of arrangement, where a rich patron of the arts buys a famous instrument and then loans it to a performer for concertizing is not uncommon.
(Source: The Universal Thread, Thread #583992)
"History of the Jam Sessions"
Barry R. Lee
DevCon jam sessions are a time-honored tradition. They were originally started back in 1989, in Ohio, when Fox Software still owned the product. When Microsoft bought Fox from Dr. Dave, they elected to carry on the tradition. And now that Advisor Publications is running the show, with an assist from Microsoft, the tradition continues.
Contrary to what a lot of people think, I don’t really organize the jam sessions. All of the equipment and facility arrangements are made by Shirley Brothers and John Hawkins. They deserve a lot of credit. John was one of the original jammers…as a matter of fact, he might be the only original left. I try to organize the players that are interested in having some tunes to play ahead of time. While it’s a little bit of effort, the results are very gratifying. Both the audience and players have a really good time.
So if you’ve never been - go. If you’ve been in the past - stop by again. Just look for us in the bar or whatever room they have us set up in. You probably won’t even have to look…just listen.
(Source: The Universal Thread, Articles Section)
"FoxPro Secret Screen"
Dale Gilstrap Leopold
What prompted me to write was your unsuccessful search for a FoxPro secret screen, or (more appropriately for the weekend I'm writing this) "Easter egg." Well such a thing does exist, as I just confirmed by calling in to a LAN I setup a few years ago. On it was a version of FoxPro 1.01 (that should give you some idea of when I set it up...). If you can dig up, dust off and install those old 1.01 disks, here's what you do:
As far as I know, there are no Easter eggs in any subsequent versions of FoxPro, but you never know... you may already have received some messages to the contrary.
(Source: BCNN's http://www.hop.man.ac.uk/staff/mpitcher/foxpro/bcnn/bcnf0694.html#10)
Also of interest is why they stopped. Developers with problems were looking up the names, calling Toledo information, and phoning the Fox team at home at night for support... <g> Yair Alan Griver
Fletcher Johnson
The buyout of Fox software was announced at DBExpo in San Francisco at my
user group meeting. The user group is located in San Jose which is south of
San Francisco. This caused some discord at the time with the San Francisco
user group because they thought that they should have been able to host the
announcements.
The presentation went well, but the MS guy with all the business cards for
the raffle disappeared. So I ended up throwing out all the freebies into
the audience.... For some reason, they didn't ask me to host another major
announcement....
Anyway, after the presentation, a bunch of us were asked what we thought.
The questions started with "Do you think that MS just bought FoxPro to beef
up Cirrus (the code name for Access at the time.) Those that said yes, etc.
were quoted in the magazines. But those (like me) who said that we expected
MS to market FP for a long time and why were ignored and none of those
statements made it into print......
And here it is, ten years later and you can still buy VFP!
Peter Stordiau
Wanted to start a company as part of BSO/Origin in 1986, developing mainframe-apps based on PC-networks after some experience in dBASE III?. No one believed in this stuff, so he started his own company in 1986, Heart Informatisering B.V., and selected FoxBase+? (multi-user, yeah !) for the development-tool.
Too much was asked from FoxBase and regular contact with Fox Software fixed the most crucial bugs (thanks for the Dutch Distributor of Fox too !).
When the first version of Heart-Profit ( ERP) was running at several customers, Microsoft bought FoxPro, and from version 2.00 Heart-Profit started to run under that. Okay, it did not, because the memory-management of 2.00 was really nothing. Helpdesk numbers of Fox Software became numbers of Microsoft, and 2.00a was doing it's job a lot better. 2.00a became 2.5 and now everything was officially running, though the app contained several hundreds (or more) work-arounds.
2.6 (Dos) was released, but problems started again and it was layd aside.
Some 6-7 years ago VFP 3.0 was tried for a few simple things, but again, causing too much memory-problems; in order to start attempting to run Heart-Profit graphically, one year was worked on 2.6a (Windows), and just when this was finished with nice result, of course this was not it, though all big ERP-apps were creating a graphical shell, having no real objects etc.
Now VFP 5.0 was tried, en yeah, this seems to work allright. A real OS was created in order to map the procedural Dos-code to the Object-environment, and in the 4 years of working on this, no more than 10 real bugs where discovered in VFP5. This, for being the first VFP5-buyer in Europe (ie very premature official version) was nice stuff.
Over a year ago again a very first version of VFP6 was bought, but messed up all classes due to having used custom method-names etc. now existing as VFP-names in 6. Stupid, and own fault (hmm ?).
Right at this moment 2.5 is still used for the Dos-version of Heart-Profit, and VFP5 (no SP) is used for the Win-version, not giving any problems.
The app is developed in simple (!) procedural code in Dos (over 7,000 prg), but runs Object-Event? for Win, allowing for over 100 users on one server, not noticing they are all there on a database consisting of 800 server-tables and 1,400 including local tables. One logical transaction may use 80 tables and in such an environment over 1,000,000 transactions may be performed in one day.