FoxPro 2

FoxPro is a text-based procedurally-oriented programming language and DBMS, originally published by Fox Software and later by Microsoft, for MS-DOS, MS Windows, Apple Macintosh, and UNIX.

Although FoxPro is a Database Management System (DBMS) and it does support relationships between tables, it is not considered a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS), lacking transactional processing.

The final published release of FoxPro was 2.6, after which the name was changed to Visual FoxPro.

Although no longer sold or supported by Microsoft, there is still an active worldwide community of FoxPro users and programmers. FoxPro 2.6 for UNIX (FPU26) has even been successfully installed on Linux and FreeBSD using the Intel Binary Compatibility Standard (ibcs2) support library.

Version information

Operating system compatibility

Extant Versions by OS

Version	FP 2.0	FP 2.5	FP 2.6
MS-DOS	Yes	Yes	Yes
Windows 3.1 to XP	Yes	Yes	Yes
Macintosh	No	Yes	Yes
SCO UNIX	No	No	Yes
Linux & FreeBSD	No	No	Yes [using the ibcs files from the Linux ABI project at Sourceforge.]
Windows 2000	No	No	Yes

Technical aspects

FoxPro 2 was a major breakthrough, because of its "Rushmore" optimizing engine, which consisted of using indexes to accelerate data retrieval and updating. Rushmore technology examined every data-related statement, and looked for filter expressions. If one was used, it looked for an index matching the same expression.

In addition, FoxPro2 was originally built on WatCOM C++, which had its own memory extensor - at that time state-of-the-art. FoxPro2 could access expanded and extended memory, using almost all available RAM (DOS). It used some interrupts in absence of the extended memory driver: if no HIMEM.SYS was loaded, FoxPro enabled that mechanism.

Version Timeline

Version	VERSION() returns	EXE Size	EXE Date
FPW 2.6a	FoxPro 2.6a for Windows	2,444 kb	28-SEP-1994
FPM 2.6a	FoxPro 2.6a for Macintosh	? kb	August 1994
FPD 2.6a	FoxPro 2.6a for DOS	1,788 kb	August 1994
FPW 2.6	FoxPro 2.6 for Windows	? kb	March 1994
FPM 2.6	FoxPro 2.6 for Macintosh	? kb	1993
FPD 2.6	FoxPro 2.6 for DOS	? kb	March 1994
FPU 2.6	FoxPro 2.6 for UNIX	2.3 Mb	1993
FPW 2.5	FoxPro 2.5 for Windows	1.63 Mb	Jan. 1993
FPD 2.0	FoxPro 2.0 for DOS	465.86 kb	1991

References

External links

* [http://www.foxprohistory.org/foxprotimeline.htm History of FoxPro - Timeline]
* [http://www.foxprohistory.org/ A site devoted to the history of FoxPro]
* [http://www.vfug.org/ Virtual FoxPro User Group] - Free online support resource
* [http://www.tek-tips.com/threadminder.cfm?pid=182 Microsoft: FoxPro (old versions 1 to 2.6) Forum] - Free online support resource
* [http://www.intergate.com/~dallen24/ FoxPro FAQs]