ScuzzBlog: Diaries October 2021 Entry 13th October 2021: dBASEII and my database obsession. dBASEII and my database obsession. What set this little hare a running was the discovery of the small booklet for dBase in the bottom of that Amstrad PP7 I reviewed the other day. I was sure I had dBASEII. I was very confident of finding the disc and or manual amongst my C64 and Amstrad stuff. Sadly I uncovered nothing. There is a chance it is tucked away with my C64 software as I have so much. The product is so familiar to me as is the title description. I will have another look. I do have other Amstrad database software but I guess I would like to uncover DBASEII. This software was really the first of the best and came out as DBASEII. There was no version I. Published by Ashton-Tate for CP/M it was soon to become one of the best selling software titles of 1984. For my part I was creating data bases even before I had a computer. The very first thing I did with my ZX81 was design a data base so I could catalogue and keep track of all my articles in the Architects Journal. I still have my tapes labelled SAJ: Subject AJ. By the time I moved to the PCW9512 I was using RPED and Mallard BASIC to fashion my own data base lists. These would grow into many disks all labelled A to Z or simply A-Z. I have so many CF-2 disks with versions of my data base on them. RPED was a truly wonderful text editor created by Roland Perry at Amstrad and born out of their being no text editor with CP/M. I like to think of it as Roland in the Card Index. With the Amiga came Softwood File IIsg which originally came on a cover disk and which I eventually purchased. Has to be the best DB software ever created. So simple to use and so easy to edit. I had been using WordWorth and even Mini Office but these paled into insignificance in comparison to Softwood. And such a small program. Fortunately HTML came along after 1996 and gave me the best tool possible to create my own database. In truth my own version of a DB application has always been way better than any pre-made software. And today I am still building my vast database. For the Spectrum and Amstrad you really can't beat Mini Office and I have all versions. Thing is I had a bit of a problem on the CPC464 with the CF-2 and tried to copy this with DiscKit3 and CP/M on the 6128Plus but discovered it was protected. If I had my tools disc I could have hex dumped the software and changed the flag. Talking of tools I created a nifty CV Tools entry for my Amstrad data file similar to the Amiga so Clara Veiga has now transferred also over to taste a bit of that particular 'Sugar'. Sweet. It is really funny what I find in some of my boxed software. Top of a very large pile of Mini Office boxes was one with my MegaloSound sampler inside. Made me laugh. dBASEII and my database obsession.

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Last updated 13th October 2021

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