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 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.
Still it was a big problem for the company and Microsoft managed to ship Access a couple of months ahead of Paradox for Windows, a major marketing win for Microsoft. 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. Paradox/Windows ended up delayed about a year beyond its original plan, shipping in early 1993.
The development and QA team totaled about 30 people.īoth Paradox for Windows and Quattro Pro for Windows, a closely related project, started development under beta versions of Windows 3.0, in the spring of 1990. The product manager up until shipping version 1.0 was Joe Duncan.
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.įor approximately the first year of development the object-oriented code was written in C aided by macros, until Turbo C++ was available, at which point the remaining parts of the code were written in C++. The ObjectPAL was (like Hypercard) associated with the visual objects - also revealed by right click. 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. The Forms and Reports designers used device-independent scaling including ability to work in zoomed mode for detailed layout. An object-based language based on ideas from Hypercard was used in place of keystroke recording. The ObjectPAL changes were controversial but forced since PAL was based on keystroke recording actions that had no equivalent in Windows. Although key features of the DOS product, the QBE and the database engine, were ports keeping the DOS code, there was a major break in compatibility from PAL to ObjectPAL and in the shift to a GUI design metaphor for Forms and Reports. Paradox for Windows applications are programmed in a different programming language called ObjectPAL. Paradox for Windows is distinctly different from Paradox for DOS, and was produced by a different team of programmers. There are a few MSDOS emulators, among which are (a paid-for product) and (which has a freeware option), both of which provide the ability to run Paradox for DOS applications (such as Paradox 4.5 for DOS) on Windows Vista and above 64-bit operating systems.Įxample of QBE query with joins, designed in Paradox for Windows
The features that distinguished Paradox/DOS were: Other notable competitors were Clarion, DataEase, R:Base, and DataFlex. At that time, dBase and its xBase clones ( Foxpro, Clipper) dominated the market. Paradox/DOS was a successful DOS-based database of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Version 4.0 and 4.5 were retooled in the Borland C++ windowing toolkit and used a different extended memory access scheme. Versions up to 3.5 were evolutions from 1.0. Notable classic versions were 3.5 and 4.5. In September 1987, Borland purchased Ansa Software, including their Paradox/DOS 2.0 software.
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. Paradox for DOS was a relational database management system originally written by Richard Schwartz and Robert Shostak, and released by their Belmont, California-based company Ansa Software in 1985.