Apple's Unknown Database: FileMaker Pro 2.1 (1993) Unboxing and Review
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- Опубліковано 28 тра 2024
- Most people are unaware that Apple has its own relational database that dates back to the 1980s and today is up to version 18 and is used by tens of thousands of people world wide, with over 24 million total copies delivered since its inception.
The version of FileMaker we are unboxing today is FileMaker Pro 2.1, which was released as a small update to FileMaker Pro 2(1992) in 1993. This version of FileMaker Pro 2 came still sealed in its original box, and we will be doing a full unboxing, review, and demonstration of it. The demonstration Macintosh is a PowerBook G3 "Lombard" with a 400 mhz PowerPC processor, 512 MB of RAM, and a 4 GB hard drive.
Hope you enjoy :)
Selected Credits:
John Osbourn's interesting article on FileMaker history
www.philosophyoffilemaker.com/...
dBase
By Mrozlog - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
Leading Edge
By Hertzertec - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
A number of photos and screenshots of FileMaker 1.0 are taken from
filemakerexamples.co.uk/blog/...
Mac IIfx
CC BY-SA 3.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index... - Розваги
The advantage of putting the license terms on the packaging is that it limits the length of the legalese.
Built my first FileMaker database on version 2.1 and have worked with almost every version since and still love developing in FileMaker, which is at version 19.6.3 at the time of this writing, and keeps getting better all the time. ❤
Back in the early 90's, I was a huge fan and user of FileMaker Pro on my Mac IIcx. Thanks for the memories.
Glad you enjoyed the video, thanks for commenting! I’ve been amazed to see just how much people could do with the old, non-relational versions of FM back in the day, it really was an amazingly flexible database.
The mic in the new vids really helps. But great content going back years!
I used it, back in my Mac days. I even programmed it with AppleScript. I wrote a cheque-reconciliation application where a script scanned through the records, looking for ones for statement entries that had amounts matching ones for stub entries, and marked them as reconciled against each other. It took several seconds to find and process each record.
Then I switched to Linux, and rewrote the application as a Python script using an SQLite database. It was so fast it could reconcile everything in the time it took the Mac original to find the next record.
Very interesting! As a full time FileMaker developer its interesting to hear just how much faster Python is, especially since its an interpreted language same as FM scripts. What was the last version of FileMaker that you used?
Possibly version 4. AppleScript was always pretty terrible for performance. On top of limitations of MacOS versus Linux.
I’ve worked with AppleScript in FM a bit, but only for pretty basic stuff (opening the browser and going to a website), didn’t realize that it had such a performance penalty.
I’m working on learning Linux, I just switched to a full Linux (Pop!OS) setup on my new video editing tower, and I have to say that Linux is much easier to use than it was last time I really played with it, which was over a decade ago with Red Hat Linux.
FileMaker server now runs on CentOS too so I may need to play around with that at some point, I’m curious to see if there are any performance improvements.
I wish I had known that Filemaker was Nutshell. I was self taught in Basic and Nutshell, Nutshell Plus, Nutshell Ultra, and Ultraplus. I loved that I could execute all functions and Latout setups, fancy printing with control codes etc with just the keyboard. Far faster than leaving the keyboard and using a mouse and pointing precisely. I got to the point that everything we needed was accomplished with macros, zooming to other files (relational?).
For many stupid reasons (at the time) we converted to Borland Paradox (which I also loved )
I started developing in FMPro on version 2.1 for windows when it got released, been developing ever since!!
I've worked with FM 5, 7, 8, 12, and 17. I still hace a FM server 7 in production since 2004. Rock solid software. Originally installed in windows 2k server and moved to 2k3, 2k8, 2k12 and 2k16...
You are an amazing film maker and storyteller !! .... seriously! the stop-motion sequence caught me! love your vids. Peace from Vienna, Austria.
Wow, look at those manuals! I really miss comprehensive manuals that explain how to do anything. Modern software is far, far more complicated than this, but software publishers give you almost no documentation. It's sad, really.
I loved Filemaker when it was an easy to use consumer database. I regretfully had to leave it when it became a much more costly and complex product for commercial developers. I've move on to Ninox, but still love that long-ago Filemaker. It did all I needed and did it well.
Seems very primative compared to Paradox for Windows that I used on my iMacs via a VM.
My 1st Pdox databases were in 1992 when the version was already at 4.5.
I still use Pdox Win (on a PC unfortunately) not having realised that there was an Apple database available. The name FileMaker does not suggest a database to me, in fact it produces no image of its function as every user facing programme makes files !
I love FileMaker, but I wish there was an open source alternative. It’s too corporate focused these days.
Kexy is the closet open source project I've ever found
I worked for a university bookstore that used filemaker pro for doing all of it's computer sales and repair invoice logging / printing. it wasn't bad except for the networking components were rather unreliable so multuser work was sometimes annoying.
My left ear really exited this
5:00 youtubers understand stereo audio challenge 2020
Did you open something worth several $$ remaining in the plastic wrap?
Boxed, sealed copies of FileMaker are pretty affordable, it's such a niche program that so few people have heard about that there really isn't much of a market for older versions. I think I only paid something like 15-20 dollars for this one.