Tech History Channel (28.07.2026)
Visual FoxPro was a powerful database and language originally developed in the 90s; it quickly built a large user base due to its incredible speed, it was faster than any database of its quality in the market saving developers minutes and some times hours of unnecessary waiting, it was so good that the king of consumer databaeses Asthon tate claimed that Foxbase the originally name of FoxPro ripped off its copyrighted programming language, the had case Foxbase was “inspired” by Ashton Tate’s databse the idea was the simialirity between the product would allow users familiart with Ashton Tate’s DB to easily switch over to Foxbase the faster DB, luckily the court ruled that code was not copyrightable in the way that Ashton Tate wanted, so Foxbase could continue on its blazing path of growth eventually renaming its porduct to FoxPro, it was precisely at this point that the tech viallin of the 1990s appeared Microsoft, for years it had see the extrondiary growth of FoxPro and boucned around the idea of making a serious push into the consumer database market. When they saw that Ashton Tate was wounded from the court case and rapidly losing market share to FoxPro, they decided rather than entering the market they would buy their way into it, so they purchased FoxPro for $173 million, a modest sum by today’s Silicon Valley standards but quite the small fortune in 1994 when the deal closed. Intailly Microsoft suppoerted FoxPro well updating it and make it an esstentially part of its developer strategy but soon they began make a few strange moves like dropping its cross platform supporting and entrapping FoxPro users into the Windows platform, eventually it became clear that FoxPro was not only not apart of Microsoft’s strategy but it was actively hindering its development strategy as whole as it fragmented its developer community, Microsoft wanted a unifried developement effort centred around its dot net framework and FoxPro didnt fit that world so it had to go and thousands of developers were left in the dust, they tried to file pettions but nothing worked Microsoft didn’t care, developers were forced to migrate elsewhere.
Visual FoxPro remains a point of contention for developers. See the history behind the Microsoft programming phase-out controversy.
This documentary features archival footage of Bill Gates alongside the timeline of the Visual FoxPro discontinuation. We explore the 2007 developer petition that urged Microsoft to reconsider its decision to end support for the platform, highlighting the tension between corporate strategy and user loyalty.
Whether you are a long-time developer or interested in software development history, this video provides context on how companies manage legacy software tools. By revisiting these events, we gain insight into why the community fought to keep Visual FoxPro alive and what that says about the lifecycle of proprietary coding languages.