One of the original Fox developers wrote a great behind-the-scenes book about the software and the company culture, uptil their acquisition by Microsoft.
It is one of the more niche, under-appreciated technology books out there: "FoxTales: Behind the Scenes at Fox Software" by Kerry Nietz
FoxPro was originally FoxBase, a clone of dBase III, and in some respects better than dBase - IIRC, it could handle larger files, and worked better on a Novell Netware. FoxBase was however a console application - no windowing and no mouse.
Then in the beginning of 1989, they started working on "FireFox" - that's where the classic FoxPro GUI came to life. It was a big departure from dBase, and the name went thru multiple iterations before it became FoxPro. It was a runaway success. dBase never caught up - dBase IV tried catching up with FoxPro's GUI, but it was buggy, slow, and its lunch was being eaten by Nantucket's Clipper compiler.
It was fun times, but sadly the xBase dialect wars were superseded by the rise of Windows, and by the time people retooled into Delphi and Visual Basic, that went away and the web became the dominant application platform.
correction: dBase IV came out before FoxPro. From the book:
"By the beginning of summer ‘89, FoxPro was turning into an impressive product. As an outgrowth of the new language added to emulate dBase IV, and our new window-based interface, many items present in earlier Fox products were substantially transformed."
Kerry continues:
"By the beginning of summer ‘89, FoxPro was turning into an impressive product. As an outgrowth of the new language added to emulate dBase IV, and our new window-based interface, many items present in earlier Fox products were substantially transformed.
One of these was our text editor. Two commands in the language would present this to a user, MODIFY FILE and MODIFY COMMAND. In FoxBASE+, the editor was simplistic. It just filled the screen with whatever file was being edited. Only one file could be edited at a time, and there was a rigid limit to how big that file could be. It was functional for developing dBase programs, but most hardcore users would buy an additional editing program to do real text editing work.
As coded by Eric, though, the new FoxPro editor was an animal of a different color (no pun intended). It resided in a window and users could have as many text files open concurrently as they liked. They could easily copy and paste text between different files. There was no limit to the size of the file. (No attainable limit, anyway; the actual limit for a text file was larger than most modern disk drives.) It was also blindingly fast. It could open hundreds of files in seconds and scroll text faster than it could be read."
They were bought by Microsoft when they released a version of FoxPro with "rushmore", that made it many times faster than the competion. I still remember the adds.
It is one of the more niche, under-appreciated technology books out there: "FoxTales: Behind the Scenes at Fox Software" by Kerry Nietz
FoxPro was originally FoxBase, a clone of dBase III, and in some respects better than dBase - IIRC, it could handle larger files, and worked better on a Novell Netware. FoxBase was however a console application - no windowing and no mouse.
Then in the beginning of 1989, they started working on "FireFox" - that's where the classic FoxPro GUI came to life. It was a big departure from dBase, and the name went thru multiple iterations before it became FoxPro. It was a runaway success. dBase never caught up - dBase IV tried catching up with FoxPro's GUI, but it was buggy, slow, and its lunch was being eaten by Nantucket's Clipper compiler.
It was fun times, but sadly the xBase dialect wars were superseded by the rise of Windows, and by the time people retooled into Delphi and Visual Basic, that went away and the web became the dominant application platform.