The tBASE database
Now which tape was "Supper's Ready" on?
Now which tape was "Supper's Ready" on?
I had so many tapes I couldn't find any tracks, and my hand-writen cassette and box labels were rubbish.
Something had to give, and my discovery of dBASE III gave me a golden opportunity to learn database programming, find my desired tracks among the 250-odd cassettes I owned and print out dceent-looking labels. tBASE was born.
Written in dBASE III it allowed track, artist and album lookup, listings sorted and filtered as required, plus the printing of cassette labels and box inserts via my trusty Epson dot-matrix printer.
It was a good project to learn dBASE on and did what was required, but the processing speed became unacceptable once the number of tapes passed 300 so I bought a dBASE compiler called Clipper, and in the typical way of IT we know all too well this required EMS expanded memory, additional drivers and eventually a new PC.
The coming of the laser printer (in my case a rare splash out on an HP LaserJet II) allowed proportional fonts, but re-writing tBASE's printer driver to permit this required a different approach: each new piece of text had to be placed on the page with co-ordinates rather than a fixed number of spaces from the previous text. Actually a great way of learning how laser printers really worked, and it did make really good cassette box labels.
Sadly tBASE got deleted when I bought my CD Walkman, marking the end of my love affair with cassettes, and MS Windows appeared, which would have required a re-write in FoxPro, which I never quite got the hang of. I wish I had a photo of it in action but sadly I don't.