Skip to main content

The Future Back in 1992

This was noted over on Presentation Zen where I first started watching it. It's amazing to think this was Jobs presenting back in 1992, the year after FoxPro 2.0/DOS came out onto the market and the same year FoxPro 2.x/Windows was all the buzz.

I recalled seeing a Next machine back in 1991 and immediately wanted one - I even got excited about learning Unix. This intro to NextStep might show you why but really - watch the video instead.

Highlights:
Where is Improv today? That was ONE awesome spreadseet and Excel's naming features never could really compete with it the same way.
NextMail with its drag and drop support.
The DigitalLibrary - where you can pull up articles that you wanted to save (back in 1992) and even had its own search criteria.

The Drag/Drop and Object linking is still something that we currently don't have or users still struggle with. (dragging and dropping from between multiple OSs with live linking) - jeez, I remember doing demos of OLE Linking and embedding in Windows - when? 1997? (anyone remind me)

But the Cool part is custom app development (around the 23 minute mark). Creating a GUI search tool for backend databases (with their DatabaseKit). For those thinking "what's the big deal?" - this was one of the first demos where I can recall the words "you don't have to write any code" - kind of like the mantra Microsoft was talking about this year with Rock the Launch and one I myself have repeated in training classes with Builders and Wizards.

"And you can switch to new databases using 'Adapters' without writing any custom code".

Great nostalgia video but even more- it's amazing what features we use every day today that were just being explained back then.


p.swf (application/x-shockwave-flash Object)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Blogs and RSS come to Microsoft.com

MS has just introduced their portal and it's pretty comprehensive. Nothing quite like learning that some people use AIM instead of MSN messenger, or that there really may be a need for supporting 4 monitors ( Cyrus Complains ) However, it's really a great sign that MS is serious about supporting the blogging community which seems to have um, exploded in size in the past year. Blogs and RSS come to Microsoft.com

Programmers vs. Developers vs. Architects

I received an email this morning from Brandon Savage 's newsletter. Brandon's a PHP guru (works at Mozilla) but his newsletter and books have some great overall perspectives for developers of all languages. However, this last one (What's the difference between developers and architects?) kind of rubs me the wrong way. Either that, or I've just missed the natural inflation of job descriptions. (maybe, it's like the change in terminology between Garbage man and Waste Engineer or Secretary and Office Administrator) So maybe it's just me - but I think there's still a big difference between Programmer, Developer and then of course, architect. The key thing here is that every role has a different perspective and every one of those perspectives has value. The original MSF create roles like Product Manager, Program Manager, Developer, Tester, etc - so every concept may pigeon hole people into different roles. But the statements Brandon makes are often distinction

FoxInCloud Stats

FoxInCloud sent this link a while back about their statistics regarding visits to their site: http://foxincloud.com/blog/2017/12/27/VFP-community-lessons-from-foxincloud-site.html What's interesting here is the breakdown of people. Yes, I think it's understandable that the Fox community is getting older. Another factor is the growth of the mobile and web environments taking over development. These environments really do push people towards the newer non-SQL or free SQL/hosted environments but more towards hosted storage options like Amazon and Google. A tool like FoxInCloud that helps MOVE existing applications to the cloud inherently competes with those environments. But FoxInCloud also allows developers to extend their application further by giving them a starting point using Javascript and the basic CSS (such as Bootstrap). If you're not rebuilding your application from scratch, it's certainly a great step forward. FoxPro VFP