Oh, Dbase III, I did play with that but I can't remember using SQL - maybe I did...

The first version of Access I used was Access2 while trying to help one of my brothers out with something. We had a lot of problems with it and I ended up refusing to have any more to do with it. The final straw was a little bit of code - can't remember the syntax but as a general idea, by the time I'd re-written it , it ran along these lines:

  test = 0
  while test <> 1
     if test <> 1 then
        test = 1
        print "test is now set to 1"
     else        print "test is now equal to" & test & "I should leave next time"  

It just used to get stuck in a loop and it was not a case of a miss-spelt variable in the while (or whatever loop I used) loop - ended up having 2 people confirming it wasn't me...

I ended up swithing to Paradox and later moved onto Delphi which with BDE, used the Paradox tables.

Around the time I got to play with DBase III, I was also using Turbo Pascal and wrote a couple of programs in that, including one that was a sort of treatment appointment/register just using the TP file handling. The physio register one ran from about 1988 to 1998 - my mum's retirement on an 8086 and remained useful - not a great one but I'm still quite proud of that one - several thousand lines of TP which included the interface and I think only one bug found in that period.

Jon