Paradox (database)
[4] Paradox for DOS was a relational database management system originally written by Richard Schwartz and Robert Shostak, and released by their Belmont, California-based[5] company Ansa Software in 1985.
[1] The New York Times described it as "among the first of an emerging generation of software making extensive use of artificial intelligence techniques," and noted that Paradox could read the competing Ashton Tate's dBase files.
The Forms and Reports designers used device-independent scaling including ability to work in zoomed mode for detailed layout.
The mouse right-click was used for access to Forms and Reports properties, inspired by the Xerox Alto and Smalltalk, in a way now almost universal to Windows programs.
Property inspection and layout tools could be "pinned up" to stay on screen, an idea borrowed from the NeXT and now fairly widely adopted in Windows.
[3] The reasons were many, but not entirely surprising for a major rewrite, in an OO language with new tools, shifting to a GUI paradigm, on what was essentially a first version operating system.
In 1990, Borland also started work on an internal dBASE clone for both DOS and Windows, written in assembler, which was planned to ship in 1992.
By early 1992 it became clear that Ashton-Tate was in difficulties on developing Windows versions of their products and so Borland switched plans, instead acquiring the company and anointing their internal project as the official successor.
In response to Borland's acquisition of Ashton-Tate, Microsoft acquired FoxPro and incorporated its Rushmore technology into the Access Jet Engine to significantly improve its performance.
Microsoft Access offered many features that were easier for end users and developers to implement, including a more intuitive query interface using Windows links between fields rather than the Paradox text tagging of fields in QBE, and the Access Basic programming language which was more similar to PAL than ObjectPAL.
Many product lines were discontinued, corporate reorganization and consolidation was painful, and, even worse, the internal dBASE project at the center of the acquisition rationale was eventually canceled for technical reasons, leaving Borland with a collapse in revenues and a serious need to develop the missing dBASE for Windows in a hurry.
Faced with a fragmented market and the need to rewrite programs to take advantage of Windows, there was little incentive for xBase users to stay loyal to the brand they'd used for DOS.
[citation needed] Despite solid follow-on versions with improvements to usability for entry-level users, Paradox faded from the market.
Borland itself retained the InterBase/IDAPI server and focused efforts on its Delphi tools, which over the years gave it an influential but small part of the data-oriented developer market.
On 30 July 2024, Larry DiGiovanni announced to the community that eventually the pnews.thedbcommunity.com server would go read-only and then be shut down entirely and that it would be replaced with a Google group, TheDBCommunity.
