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Comment by Keyframe | Hacker News Reader

90's Apple (the beige phase, hah) users knew about FileMaker. At least in my own little circle. There was even a debate FileMake vs 4D (I was in 4D camp). Weird time to be alive. RAD tools and UML, everything visual basically, seemed to be THE FUTURE. Look at us now.

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It's juvenile, but I can't help laughing at "Visual Basic-ally."

It was a sad attempt at humor :)

I forgot all about 4D. At my first real job we had a business management package based on 4D. The website was LAMP and eventually we wanted to offer B2B stuff so I had to build systems to keep 4D and MySQL in sync. Later we purchased and merged with a company using a system with an Oracle backend and for some reason we had to keep the systems separate. So I got to add Oracle in to mix syncing to the website. Fun times.

LAMP? that must've been the tail-end phase then. When I was around these tools (as a kid, but a working kid heh) everything visual was all the rage. We will click solutions away, they've said. Solaris and other cumbersome CLI only crap would go away, they've said. Linux, what is that? - they've said. Fun times, indeed!

It's a sad day when one regrets UML.

It was a good idea, until it got all enterprisey.

I never got to know the early UML. I get its value, large project, intangible potential and actual mess, need to abstract over diabolic languages like c++. I went into it around UML 2.x, just when XML was peaking too. The enterprise era.

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