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JULY1990
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An Interview
with David Fulton,
Amy
Fulton, William Ferguson, and
Eric
Christensen of Fox
Software
[Ed.Note:
The following interview was conducted in April, 1988, and published in the Sept/Oct 1988 edition of
Programmer’s
Update.
It is reprinted here in abridged form with the kind permission of SDC Publications, publishers of
Programmer's Update
The publishers can be reach at Software Developer’s Company,
5
Pond Park Road, Hingham, MA 02043.
The interview is quite revealing regarding the Fox Software team’s view of the graphical, event-driven style of software found on the Macintosh, under the OS/2 Presentation Manager, and now under Windows 3. It also gives an interesting glimpse of the personalities behind Fox- base
+
fMac and FoxPro.
Note that the capitalized initials that precede each response from Fox identify the speaker as follows: Dave Fulton (DF), Amy Fulton (AF), Wil11am Ferguson (WF), and Eric Chris-
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Programmer’s Update’s
Preface to the
Original Article:
This interview.., with the core development team involved in the FoxBASE +/Mac port, is interesting for several reasons.
First,
it offers insights forthose consideringa veiy complex
platform
jump; secon4 it reveals an interesting strateV for moving to OS/2; and thir4 it demonstrates
the
general theme that development goals can be supported by intermediate,
highly
profitable projects
—
which may turn out to rival the
original
goal in
How did you arrive at the decision to port FoxBASE + to
the
Mac?
DF: We had some
discussionswith Microsoft early last year, and in the course of those discussion we learned a little bit about the state of the documentation and the stability of the internal specification for Microsoft Windows. Our original thought had been to do a windowing version of FoxBASE
+,
but we determined that the Windows environment was still relatively immature and didn’t have the programming tools yet. We
continued on page 2
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This Month:
Foxbase +/Mac!
Charles Williams, who begins a
column
in our newsletter this month, has agreed to do a presentation on Foxbase +fMac at our July meeting This presentation, in addition to addressing the needs of the many Macintosh-using members of our group, is particularly well-timed in view of the recent release of Windows 3.0 for the PC. Although Fox Software has not announced a Windows version of FoxPro, Dave Fulton and others at Fox have repeatedly stated that Foxbase +IMac is a good place to look if you want to see what’s coming in FoxPro 2.0. [See the interview with Fox Software at left.]
A Windows version of FoxPro is apparently an item of considerable interest to FoxPro users. A few weeks ago I posted a question to Fox Software on the Compuserve FOX- FORUM about their plans for a Windows version of Pro. The question spawned a message thread over 100 messages in length. I’ve excerpted highlights from this on-line discussion and had hoped to print them in this newsletter, but alas!, Compuserve’s copyright policy means there will be a delay of at least a month. Nevertheless, I’ll bring some copies of the excerpted discussion to the user group meeting, so get in touch with me there if you’re keen to see what issues are being faced by those trying to run FoxPro under Windows 3.
FoxPro/Windows: Things to Think About
FoxPro developers, like Fox
Software
itself,
will have an easier time of it than most PC programmers making the transition to Windows. We’ll already be used to many of the basic concepts and techniques associated with the windowing environ-
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Porting Foxbase to the Mac
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TOPIC: ‘“Foxbaseón the Mact”
PRESENTER:
CharlesWiIllams
Come
see
where FoxPro came from1 Come
see
where FoxPro Is headed.
ADMISSION $5
TO
NON-MEMBERS,
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