[Anonymouse]

dBase III? I used that on my HND, had fun with it. Good software. Creating forms was a doddle.

I hesitate to call ORACLE and SQL a database. 'Bloody nightmare' is closer. The version on UNIX c/o Liverpool University, where I did a post-grad course in 1997, was so slow as to be unusable, despite our using SUN workstations which definitely were not slow. Not that I didn't expect it given my 1991 experience at a distance, but no real progress in 6 years? Terrible.
Taking screen dumps (required for the course, to show your program in action) was almost impossible and took ages - and you had to do it one student at a time, else the entire system would (and often did) fall over. I despised it. Structured Query Language (I called it unStructured Queer Language, much more accurate - with apologies to our gay patrons such as Kimmy) was anything but consistent. A trigger that would work on one data field refused to work on another of the same type. I even remember one which worked one day and didn't want to know the next day - and each module was only 2 weeks long.

Certainly not enough for C++, which I found totally confusing. 2 years wouldn't have been enough IMO. Haven't bothered with it since. Same with Java. My program compiled cleanly, and that was as far as I would (could) go.

Definitely enough for wrapper CGI programs to combine C and HTML generated via C, though. I had fun creating an online kitty adoption shop using a CGI C program (some students went overboard with elaborate credit card coding, but I stuck to KISS and made it COD - simples!). Got an A.

One innovation remarkable for 1997: we never wrote anything down. Each module lecturer was a superuser, so s/he could access our stuff directly - you just copied everything to a particular directory and s/he could test it from there. No need to waste time handing anything in. All documentation was via text files, nothing physically printed (except for our own records, usually only once when we'd finished our project). Damn good idea, I thought.

Things have indeed changed. Mostly they've gone worse.

And we are indeed O/T.