The US Years
Having settled a financial arrangement with DBE Software, which guaranteed an appropriate monthly income, I practically abandoned marketing efforts in Brazil and dedicated, with Marcos and Rapahel, two fantastic developed I hired, to enhance the product.
Initially, new versions were sent in diskette, through express mail, faxing DBE (Jody Miksch, in this case) the news:
Initially we decided to go after Datacom customers. I was horrified to find out that in the US most Datacom shops did NOT used the IDEAL programming language, so the data entry to DB-Examiner was practically impossible. And those who used it imposed so many restricting to the access of the database catalog that the my IDEAL utility will fail due to security reasons. Nine out of ten shops would present some sort of problem; it was rather very disappointing. It took me a while to implement an alternative solution: reading the dump of the catalog, produced with one of Datacom's utilities.
But a question raised invariably: "When is the Windows version going to be ready?". That question turned, in some times, an excuse not to buy the product. Although Windows was practically unknown in Brazil at the time, it was spreading fast in the US. Faced with the dilemma, I preferred to freeze the development of new features and concentrate on the Windows version. So I decided that I was going to maintain the DOS product, and let Marcos and Raphael develop the Windows version. But soon afterwards, due to financial constraints, I was ordered by DBE to fire one of the developers, Raphael. Later, Marcos also quit. Later I hired another guy, Fernando, who helped me finish the 3.0 version (the first in the Windows environment).
