First job out of college had me working with a government built database using foxbase (not fox pro). It was a bit of an eye opener compared to the database course in college. Since we really didn't have much of a budget, any reporting I wanted to do had to use my Turbo C compiler and Postscript. It was educational.
I worked my way through undergrad (when that was still possible in the US in the late 1980s-early 1990s) working at the university library part time maintaining their databases and query systems -- which were initially in dBase III and later migrated to Foxbase, and around when I left, to the DOS-based early versions of FoxPro. I haven't thought about dBASE, Foxbase, or any sort of XBASE for over twenty years. Quite nostalgic.
All right, this is all I needed to know cited from that page:
"XBase [...] is a general term for languages and tools derived from the Ashton Tate dBASE product, popular in the 1980s and early 1990s. Clones include FoxPro, Quicksilver, dbXL, and a compiled dialect called Clipper (which spawned XbasePlusPlus, FlagShip, and Harbour)."
"XBase originated as a table-oriented non-SQL language and tool vaguely influenced by relational theory and (mainly) cursor-oriented table navigation techniques from the 1960s. It was one of the first products that easily allowed small businesses access to database concepts such as ad-hoc queries, indexing, and data-driven CrudScreen RAD when microcomputers were just coming of age. [...]"
"It allegedly has its roots in a legacy database product called RETRIEVE. The Pasadena Jet Propulsion Laboratory, famous for planetary probes, didn't want to pay licensing fees for RETRIEVE and so set out to create something similar. In a round-about way, it eventually wound up a commercial product for CPM microcomputers, and grew quite popular in the DOS world."
Some of my first programming experience was porting a CA Clipper application to Delphi/InterBase/FireBirdSQL... then we moved the database to MySQL (using the Gemini table type) Then we figured why not write a Perl/DBI CGI web app... then PHP. That started my love affair with the web.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 30.3 ms ] thread"XBase [...] is a general term for languages and tools derived from the Ashton Tate dBASE product, popular in the 1980s and early 1990s. Clones include FoxPro, Quicksilver, dbXL, and a compiled dialect called Clipper (which spawned XbasePlusPlus, FlagShip, and Harbour)."
"XBase originated as a table-oriented non-SQL language and tool vaguely influenced by relational theory and (mainly) cursor-oriented table navigation techniques from the 1960s. It was one of the first products that easily allowed small businesses access to database concepts such as ad-hoc queries, indexing, and data-driven CrudScreen RAD when microcomputers were just coming of age. [...]"
"It allegedly has its roots in a legacy database product called RETRIEVE. The Pasadena Jet Propulsion Laboratory, famous for planetary probes, didn't want to pay licensing fees for RETRIEVE and so set out to create something similar. In a round-about way, it eventually wound up a commercial product for CPM microcomputers, and grew quite popular in the DOS world."
There is an open source implementation at http://harbour-project.org/ (-> http://harbour.github.io/ ) whose latest version 3.0.0 was released on 2011-07-17, but the Github repo (imported from SourceForge) shows recent activity: https://github.com/harbour/core