User
Joined: 24 Oct 2007
Posts: 2
Location: OTTAWA, ONTARIO, CANADA
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Congratulations & best of luck on this new venture. MK is certainly the man to lead such an effort....and judging by the members' list he has got some great supporters in his corner.
My problem: I am involved in a smallish $1.25-million a year retail and service business in Ottawa that has been around for about 33 years. About 18 years ago we participated in the development and elaboration of a software package specifically tailored to businesses of our type. While we had design and idea input and did a lot of the beta testing the actual software code was written by our co-collaborators who still have the lock and keys, etc. The package has since been sold across Canada and has 150-250 subscribers I'm told.
In keeping with its genesis the programs are written in Microsoft Basic(GW Basic?) and from the initial CPM platform migrated to Xenix (Xenix Basic) and then to SCO Unix 5.5 (still in Xenix Basic). There are 87 some separate modules to the programs. All the data files are stored as flat files: there is/are no data base type structures.
The programs are all still very effective and do the work we and other subscribers need to have done now and into the foreseeable future. The problem is: character-only interfaces (we and others want GUI); and the outdated manner of data storage (flat files) (we and others want ODBS and similar capabilities. We also want the capability to run on Unix, Linux, Mac or Windows.
We understand certain conversion programs exist for taking BBX and Tbred & perhaps Business Basic programs and data into Providex or PX Plus.
Have or will you give some thought to facilitating the conversion of many many other legacy "basic" apps and data files into Microshare Business Basic????????? What suggestions might you offer to someone in our predicament.
Our collaborators are thinking of using faceterm? to introduce colour and boxes etc to their otherwise essentially unchanged character based apps. |
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