Alpha Database: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 15:23, 30 November 2019

A database program originally introduced in 1982 for DOS, initially a flat-file database that was marketed as an easy to use budget alternative to relational systems, but with the advent of the relational Alpha Four in 1986 the marketing started leaning towards describing the system as an easy-to-use menu driven alternative to difficult to learn programmable relational databases The company continued to sell Alpha Four alongside the flat-file Alpha three for some time after the introduction of Alpha Four.

Products

Data Base Manager
Data Base Manager II

Alpha Three

Alpha three was only released in version 1.0 with no known bug fixes.

Alpha Five

Introduced in late 1994/early 1995 as a Windows application, this was initially a cut down version of the Alpha Four system that was sold alongside it and almost like an add-on that had a RRP of US$ 129 while the full A4 system had an RRP of US$ 499, But over time grew into a fully programmable relational database system that eventually replaced Alpha Four.

1994: Alpha Five Version 1
Feb 1996: Alpha Five Version 2 for Windows 95
Dec 1996: Alpha Five Version 3 Standard Edition and Professional Edition
1998: Alpha Five Version 4

In later versions Alpha Five also gained a programming language in the form of xBasic which made it fully programmable unlike the DOS based Alpha Four system.

Author

Alpha Software Corporation

@@ Line 7: / Line 7: @@
 ===Alpha Three===
 * Alpha three was only released in version 1.0 with no known bug fixes.
-===Alpha Four===
-[[Image:Alpha-four.gif|250px|right]]
-By the time Alpha Four hit the ground in 1986 the application had been rewritten from the scratch and was being marketed as a [[dBase]] clone that could be used "without programming", which was another way of saying that the application used industry standard .dbf database and index files but was in no other way [[xBase]] compatible. Over time the company stopped using "Alpha 4" as a version number and started using it as a brand name.
-*1986: Alpha Four v1
-*1989: Alpha Four v1.1b
-*1991: Alpha Four v2 - First version to offer multi-user/networking capability at an extra cost
-*1995: Alpha Four Version 6
-*Jan 2002: Alpha Four v7 - Introduces the ability to use the [[MS Windows]] print subsystem.
-*Feb 2003: Alpha Four Version 8 for DOS
 ===Alpha Five===