My first few programming jobs were in dBASE, the last of which saw the use of dBASE go on for 15 years or so. It was a weird language but still capable of quite a lot. I learned some assembly language with the help of Peter Norton and had a few neat little addons for my dBASE code.

I tried to transition my company to Borland dBASE 5 when it came out but there was too much to try to upgrade all at once. I was really excited about a lot of the language improvements, and the fact that it was now coming from a real language company, but it was too much too late. A few years later my company moved to different software altogether and dBASE was just a (mostly) fond memory.

My most productive use of it was with the Topaz library for Turbo Pascal from Software Science. They provided a much more powerful UI capability than one could get from "@ 1,1 say ..." with drop down lists and moveable windows etc. It was still all character mode DOS stuff, but we had the whole menagerie running in Windows for Workgroups for a good while. Those were fun days.