Also Crystal Reports, Paradox...
> They worked pretty well in their domain: data entry and report generation, with lightweight transaction processing and general computation.
Having bought Ashton Tate, Borland got DBase and Interbase in addition to Paradox, and built data access components into the VCL class library (in effect "almost-first-class citizens" of the language), which IMO made Delphi the natural and superior successor to those languages: Not just "lightweight", but fully advanced (i.e, ~C++-level) general computation. (And with transaction processing built into the RDBMS connection components.)
> Then happened the internet and client-server architectures, and these do not map as neatly onto local, single-user, single-transaction tables.
Weeelll... Seen the spate of recent posts on here about how SQLite is good enough for pretty much anything? :-) And arguably, that's where Delphi was at too, over twenty years ago: AFAICR, there was a "Fishbase" (facts about tropical fish) demo included with Delphi, which in one variant could be built as a standalone Web service / server.
Also, AFAICS, that's where Free Pascal / Lazarus is at now, only using SQLite / Firebird / MySQL / PostgreSQL (and lots of other DBMSes) in stead of DBase / Clipper / FoxPro / Crystal Reports / Paradox. (I've been planning to look into that a bit closer myself, but haven't got around to it. Procrastinating away too much of my time on Hacker News, I suppose. :-( )
