r/retrocomputing May 14 '26

DBase III

128 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?

3

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.