It's such a breeze to turn out quality work with this software.

I agree with you Blink. I use a lot of different applications in my work, but Vegas is the easiest to get going with.

This year we started to use Vegas MS int the big VideoMarathon competition in Copenhagen, http://www.videomarathon.dk/uk/forside_engelsk.asp and people got used to the UI real fast.

/Ulf

I still use dBase III+ every day, so old software that is never updated or improved can certainly still be useful. I expect to get about as much support and improvement in the future from Sony as I have gotten in the past twenty years from Ashton-Tate.

"Ashton-Tate" - woah! Now that I aint heard of them for some time!!!

I've got a dBase deriv - Personal Rbase. Works in DOS and just soars in speed.

Grazie

Ha, still have my dBase, RBase and Superbase nearby also!
The one program I think I will never give up though is PFE, Personal File Editor. Free text editor.

Some things are just made correctly, or are easy enough to work around the limitations.

I wonder if the programmers in Madison work better on Pepsi or are they more productive with Mountain Dew?

That takes me back some years. Migrated from dBase III to Clipper by Nantucket. I think one of the apps I wrote is still being used.
Whatever happened to Ashton-Tate, argh, I remember, dBase IV.

Bob.

Whatever happened to Ashton-Tate ...There is a long Wikipedia entry. Short version is that they totally screwed up with a complete re-write of the code. They released it as dBase IV, and it was totally unstable. Long story about management, both at the corporate and engineering levels. I went to school with some of the players, and am currently working with a startup that has a few people from Forefront, one of the companies Asthton-Tate acquired during its heyday.

Bottom line is that the combination of the ill-fated re-write, along with competition from Foxpro (which was later acquired by Microsoft), cost them their cash flow and they had to sell. Borland ended up being the lucky winner, but that was one of the most confusing companies of all time, and pretty much everything there spun in during the early 1990s.

dBase III+, along with Visicalc (and later Lotus 1-2-3), and Wordstar, remains one of the stunning achievements of the early microcomputer era (two of these were developed on on CP/M computers like Altos, Corvus, Cromenco, etc., several years before the 1981 introduction of the IBM PC).

I still use Borland's REFLEX database software. I have a few databases that I've been maintaining since the late 80s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_Reflex

John, I WON a copy of Wordstar at an IT Expo here in London. That must have like, 1988 (?), and I thought I had captured the Moon! It came with PC Outline. Now THAT was a serious piece of Idea and idea management s/w. Dead-easy, and really got my brain organised.

When I saw FoxPro and the light-speed rate at which it worked, it just blew me away.

I remember the "Forest and Trees" thing from Borland. It was a Dos database-type of hierarchical a/w whereby you dragged and plopped whole servers of data to and from and then made "Windows-like" intuitive connections and so on. The type of front-end that ACCESS would have died for!!! - I wonder what happened to that - eh?

Grazie

I remember the "Forest and Trees" thing from Borland ... I wonder what happened to that - eh?I have the floppies, right next to me (in a box of old floppies, both 5 1/4 and 3 1/2). Don't believe me? Well here's my hand, holding one:



I could give you a long list of companies that made "front ends" to databases, hoping to give managers (and others) some magic insight into their company's various databases. Some had over-simplistic "red light, green light" readouts that would change colors if some pre-determined thresholds in various datasets was reached. Amazingly over-simplistic view of how the world works, but then again, there are many people believe there is one magic food they can eat or one magic note they can hum, and everything will be all right, so why not reduce the complexities of life to a two-valued colored light (actually, to be fair, they also had a yellow light ...)

WOW - John!!! - I am amazed!

Y'know, John, I saw F&T being demoed and I thought this was pure magic and that I had been specially invited to the realm of all things possible with IT - poor demented FOOL!!!

Ah! Such innocence eh?

Grazie

When i walked in to my previous job it was a dBase III+ shop. It was a nifty idea, but painful to develop in. After a few months i recommended FoxBase+, and later FoxPro II. Amazing improvement in speed and usability. One of the even bigger benefits was the ability to install it across the entire site instead of being held to ransom by Ashton-Tate's exorbitant per-station license fees. When i left 21 years later some of the early code i wrote was still in use.

I still remember backing up an entire year's worth of data on a 3.5" floppy. Where i work now we add several GB per day.

Wordstar. Whew. I read a review of "the year's best" in PC Magazine, oh, maybe 20 years ago. There were categories for best productivity software, best database software, best utilities, best hardware, best games, etc. Wordstar had it's own special mention all by itself, listed as "the hardest video game to win". I found that to be a very appropriate description.

Wordstar had it's own special mention all by itself, listed as "the hardest video game to win". I found that to be a very appropriate description. Ha! Good line.

Actually, I've had this discussion with engineers over the years (and many others). Specifically, the discussion is about "easy to learn" vs. "easy to use." Wordstar is always my favorite example. It was a bitch to learn (Ctl-Q then Ctrl-S to move to the beginning of a line of text?? You've got to be kidding!!). But ... and this is the key ... it was amazingly easy to use once you learned it. So much so, that when I switched to WordPerfect, one of the first things I did was use the WordPerfect macro capability to emulate those Wordstar keystrokes.

Years later, when WordPerfect lost its way and, like my company's program, found its way from Orem Utah to Ottawa Canada, I switched to Microsoft Word. The first thing I did -- you guessed it -- was to use Word's macro capability to emulate all those hard to learn, but amazingly easy to use (and actually very sensible) keyboard shortcuts (a tough thing to do since Word doesn't allow for two-key invocations of macros).

I like these shortcuts so much that I -- yes, you guessed it -- use them in Vegas!! Ctrl-A, for me, moves to the beginning of the event (instead of the beginning of a word) and Ctrl-F moves to the end of the event (just like moving to the end of a word). When Vegas isn't acting up (which it seems to do more and more these days), I can edit War and Peace in just a few minutes.

Not that anyone would want to watch my five-hour epic ...

Oh yes, I also figure out, with a registry hack, how to swap the Caps Lock and the Ctrl key on the left side of the keyboard, so the Ctrl key is where god and Micropro (the company that developed Wordstar) intended it to be.

Oh yes, I also figure out, with a registry hack, how to swap the Caps Lock and the Ctrl key on the left side of the keyboard, so the Ctrl key is where god and Micropro (the company that developed Wordstar) intended it to be.

So your hands are too small to do a left-handed Ctrl-P with the "modern" keyboard layout?

:O)

WordStar was the first word processor I learned. My computer days go back before that.. COBOL programming using a keypunch!

I too have some old software that is as reliable as the day it was released: Lotus WordPro (I think the first version after AMI Pro) though most of my work is done in Word, Lotus Approach (a far superior database to Access which I also own), an old label program that was made for Windows 3.1, a journal program I bought from Parsons in around 1992.

Back to the OT Topic - Vegas is still the top of my list for NLEs and I have used many. Whenever someone on the Liquid forums mentions something about Vegas like "multicam sucks," I share about how it blows away the same feature in Liquid. Not only that but I learned it after one post on these forums and no additional training. One of the mods keeps deleting my posts and you should hear some of the "crazy" responses. It's almost like some sort of cult. :-)

Doesn't anyone have fond memories of PaperClip on the Commodere 64 :-)

Mike

" WordStar was the first word processor I learned."

Yup.
I also had a file management system called !WONDER by Bourbaky. The last patent on it I think was 1989. It came on a 5 1/4 inch disk (with lots of room to spare). It was dos based and worked like a charm I still have all this stuff around somewhere. I never throw any of it out.

I wish they still made the AMIGA and Vegas was on it!
Burt

I wish they still made the AMIGA and Vegas was on it!Kiki, where are you?

I wish they still made the AMIGA and Vegas was on it!

I started my NLE days on an Amiga 2000.
In it's day, it was less than half the price of a comparably equipped IBM and had far more features.
IMO, Commodore ruled the desktop video world at the outset.
Unfortunately senior management had other ideas and totally blew it :-(

Mike