The idea that one needed to catalog everything was from an era when we had time on our hands to explore that new thing called a personal computer. What I call the stamp collector mentality faded. If true, it just reveals the difficult economics of small scale, user friendly databases.Īlong the way, another thing happened. I heard that it was eating into FileMaker sales. Recently, Filemaker reacted by creating a simpler, friendlier version of its flagship database called Bento, but in the end, that didn't work out and Bento was killed. The end result was that developers competed to extract every possible penny from businesses while the average user fell out of love with endless upgrade costs and hassles. Why build input and output forms when a spreadsheet lays it all out visually? AppleWorks, Numbers, and Microsoft Excel. It got to be a hassle for many.īy and by users learned that, because they were thinking in terms of flat files, there were many simple programs, likely already on hand, perhaps at modest additional cost, that could do the job without much fuss.
Meanwhile, the typical home customer-who thinks in terms of flat files-got caught up in the forward rush into ever more complex databases for business and perhaps even file format updates. That meant ever more development costs that were lost on the average user. Databases that could handle relational concepts tended to be a bit more complex and expensive. And that was perhaps part of the problem. Of course there was always a need for small businesses to build databases, but those tended to be relational. After all, we had lots of time back then. And we could select from a fairly wide range of database programs (many on the PC including the still formidable MS Access, a few on the Mac) that allowed us to keep track of our CDs, records, books, wine bottles and whatever we were collecting. We would compose documents with a word processor. But why?īack in the days before the public Internet, it was just us and our computers. However, in time, we all drifted away from that activity. A computer is the perfect tool for that kind of record keeping.
There was a time, when we were all new to personal computers, that we loved to build and use databases.
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