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Ask HN: How was enterprise software developed in 1980s?

1•theanonymousone•1h ago
Hi. This a history question to the older folk here.

We know that VB, FoxPro, Delphi etc were developed in early to mid 90s. Now, for the type of software where e.g. Visual Basic was the perfect development choice in 1990s, what would be the options in 1908s?

(Turbo) Pascal? dBase, Lotus etc? Something else?

Thanks!

Comments

fredoralive•1h ago
Not from the era, but I suspect serious enterprise stuff (accounts, ERP etc.) in the 80s would generally be on minicomputers and mainframes, so you’re probably getting into stuff like RPG, PL/I, COBOL and myriad other languages that have faded away from common use.
tvmalsv•1h ago
For me it was Turbo Pascal, Turbo C/C++, regular Borland C++.

Not an enterprise app, but I worked on a project (kind of like a primitive CMS) for a church using PFS:Write and PFS:Professional File. That was a terrible experience.

joaquinbernal•19m ago
Agreed: Borland was at its peak, and Turbo Pascal or Turbo C/C++ were used all the time. Turbo Vision was the framework under many applications: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision

Also, Clipper was very popular at that time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_(programming_language)

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