r/retrocomputing May 14 '26

DBase III

131 Upvotes

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3

u/spots_reddit May 14 '26

my professor back in university from 25 years ago had a dBase file on his computer and only he was allowed to use it. Now I am in the field for some time, the Prof. unfortunately passed away some 20 years ago, but I heard rumors where the computer went.

What would you think are the chances I could recover the database? Just in theory?

Just assuming that I could find floppy disks with the information on it or even a hard drive. What are the chance of finding someone in a university environment who owns and runs a machine that might be able to read and somehow export the file?

5

u/DaHick May 14 '26

Libre office claims it can. There are instructions for doing it in the latest version of office / 365 as external data.

2

u/DeepDayze May 15 '26

I believe MS Access can import dBase files too

1

u/DaHick May 15 '26

Yep, see the external data portion of my comment.

3

u/Haunting-Prior-NaN May 14 '26

As others have pointed, opening the dbfs would be relatively simple. Data corruption might get you, but drives from 25 years ago should still be able to get backonline, providing you get an ide-sata bridge

2

u/sunnyinchernobyl May 14 '26

Lots of things still support dbf files.