Barry Rebell: Nantucket

Brian Russel: Nantucket

Cary Prague: President and CEO - Microsoft Certified Professional, Microsoft Office User Specialist Cary Prague is an internationally best-selling author and lecturer in the database industry. He owns Database Creations, Inc. the world’s largest Microsoft Access add-on company.

Database Creations develops and markets many add-on software products for Microsoft Access including Yes! I Can Run My Businessä, a business sales and accounting program and winner of the 1998 Access Advisor Magazine Readers Choice award for best accounting application, Check Writer financial software, winner of the Microsoft Network award for best Access Application, the EZ Access line of developer products, the Access Business Forms Library distributed by Microsoft with Access 2.0 upgrades, TabMaster Pro Wizard, User Interface Construction Kit winner of the 1998 and 1996 Access Advisor Readers Choice award, the Calendar Construction Kit, the Picture Builder Add-On Picture Pack, and the Command Bar Image Editor and Image Pack.

Cary also manages a successful consulting company which is a Microsoft Certified Solution Provider specializing in Microsoft Access applications. His local and national clients include many Fortune 500 software companies, manufacturers, defense contractors, and insurance industry companies. His client list includes Microsoft, Borland International, ABB, Smith & Wesson Firearms, Pratt and Whitney Aircraft and other Fortune 500 companies.

Formerly, he has held numerous management positions in corporate information systems, including Director of Managed Care Reporting for MetraHealth, Director of Corporate Finance & Software Productivity at Travelers Insurance where he was responsible for software support and training for 35,000 end users.

He is one of the best selling authors in the computer database management market having written over thirty five books which have sold over one million copies on software including Microsoft Access, Borland’s dBASE IV, Paradox, R:Base and Framework. Cary’s books include the Microsoft Access Bible (recently number one on the Ingram Bestselling Database Titles list and in the amazom.com top 100), Access 97 Secrets, dBASE for Windows Handbook, dBASE IV Programming (winner of the Computer Press Association’s Book of the Year award for Best Software Specific Book), and Everyman’s Database Primer Featuring dBASE IV. He recently completed several new Access 2000 books.

Cary is certified in Access as a Microsoft Certified Professional and has passed the MOUS test in Access and Word. He is a frequent speaker at seminars and conferences around the country. He is on the exclusive 18 person Microsoft Access Insider Advisory Board and makes frequent trips to Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, WA. He has been voted the best speaker by the attendees of several national conferences. Recently, he was a speaker for Microsoft sponsored conferences in Hawaii, Phoenix, Chicago, Toronto, Palm Springs, Boston and Orlando. He has also spoken at Borland’s Database Conference, Digital Consulting’s Database World, Microsoft’s Developer Days, Computerland’s Technomics Conference, COMDEX, and COMPAQ Computer’s Innovate. He was a contributing editor to Access Advisor magazine and continues to write for them.

Cary holds a master’s degree in computer science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and an M.B.A and Bachelor of Accounting from the University of Connecticut. He is also a Certified Data Processor.

Dirk Lesko: Creator of the FUNCky library.

George Juarez: Nantucket

Jeff Lohrmann: I was the early VP of Sales and Marketing at SBT Corporation, an accounting software company founded in the mid 80s by Bob and Yvonne Davies out of Sausalito Ca. SBT's accounting system was originally written on top of dBase II and III. We were the largest single developer of a product written in dBase. In 1984 many computer enthusiasts were attempting to make businesses for themselves by writing dbase routines for other local businesses. We were one of the first companies that wrote a complete accounting system in dBase and so we started to get the attention of garage programmers and businesses who had dBase and had given up trying to write their own dBase routines.
We started buying the back page of dBase Advisor Magazine for $5,000 a month and soon we had every business person using dBase calling us. Everybody who was into dBase read dBase Advisor and if they did not we told them to get it. I learned to drink alot of coffee because our west coast office phone would start ringing off the hook at 5 AM and the coffee was the only way I could get as excited as my customers.
Our software was fairly buggy and ran very slow. Our VP of Development was a eccentric hobby programmer with a sociology degree from UC Santa Cruz doing his best learning as he went. Later, in the early 90s he traveled the world on behalf of Larry Ellison explaining movie data streaming to top entertainment executives.
SBT succeeded in early sales because we sold what worked which was that we had the most sophisticated inventory and customer tracking system on the market. We sold the heck out of the concept that: 80% of business comes from 20% of the customers and inventory. I also made sure to hand business customer leads off to programmers operating independently in the field in order to build a healthy dealer network. If the programmer sounded like they knew what they were doing we tossed them a lead, warning the customer to judge for themselves. Still we had alot of problems especially when it came to writing a full payroll system in dBase. It ran very slow under the weight of alot of code.
At about our second or third year of business a few companies started promoting compilers for dBase code. They advertised heavily promising results. Our dealers and programmers worked hard to adopt our product to these compilers but nothing worked well. Then one day, one of my best dealers, a guy located in Boston, called me to say that he found this dBase clone product in Ohio developed by a computer professor that compiled all our code without any changes and it ran like a top. We checked it out and the rest was history. We quickly contacted all our dealers to buy FoxBASE with every one of our products. We even resold FoxBASE. We became fast friends with the FoxBASE organization, a group of ten people. This was a relationship we enjoyed immensely as Ashton Tate was growing so fast they had little time to talk to us about our technical problems.
Quickly FoxBASE grew, but then the Ashton Tate copyright lawsuit struck and we held our breath for a year waiting for a settlement because by this time we were very committed to FoxBASE code. Fox won and the rest is history again. When Novell launched desktop PC networking we all continued to enjoy growth. SBT missed the chance to get into distributed computing when they spotted a small Walnut Creek company called PeopleSoft and in 1998 SBT was sold to Accpak.
I left the company in 1989 and helped market a non-profit computer email and conferencing system serving environmental and human rights organizations around the world. During the Russian revolt we were one of the only live connections into Moscow. This was before the Web and we were recognized in the early 90s by a MIT Media Lab journal as being one of the first public uses of the Internet. In 1994 I started organizing meeting-of-the-mind forums between customers and vendors in the Utility and Healthcare industry with the goal of bringing effective mobile computing to the vertical markets as way to open the whole mobile market. In 1998 I joined a short lived Internet company trying to create an online currency system. Today I am doing market development with businesses in agricultural waste water management and data management for water and air shed information. I am also establishing a trade association for electricity vendors serving a new electric market. I never got rich from being early to the markets because I heard "no" so much, that by the time the big market hit I was too bloody to think of myself as a leader. But today I can say I am proud to be an specialist in early market development, yanking business out of no where.

 

Larry Heimendinger: Former President of Nantucket Software.

Luis Castro: He was co-author of the famous Advanced dBASE Programmer's Guide, along with Tom Rettig and Jeb Long. Luis wrote ViewGen, a dBASE screen generator which was bought by Fox and incorporated into FoxPro 1.0 as FoxView. Later, he wrote Stage, a dictionary driven framework for FoxPro. A very powerful and under-appreciated framework.

Paul Heiser: Was the creator of dSALVAGE Professional to diagnose and repair corrupt datafiles in FoxPro, dBASE, Clipper and other Xbase products.

Randy Wallin: Co-creator of Quiet Flight Macros for Brief and dBrief editor. Later co-creator of CEE editor extensions, both along with Ryan Katri.

Tom Rettig:Tom Rettig was the first boy who tagged after Lassie during the famous collie's 20 years on the CBS television network. An already established child star, he was chosen from over 500 other boys to play the 11 year old midwestern farm boy, Jeff Miller, when "Lassie" (1954) premiered on September 12, 1954. He stayed with the series until 1958. He made his stage debut at age 6 in the touring company of "Annie Get Your Gun", with 'Mary Martin'. His screen debut was at age 9 and he made 17 films. His most memorable screen performance was as the boy with the vivid imagination in 'The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T.'

Following 'Lassie' came a troubled life filled with failure to land major adult roles, arrests and convictions for growing marijuana, divorce, and a string of jobs including photographer, tool salesman, computer programmer, and health club manager.

For the last ten or so years of his life (starting 1984, maybe earlier), Tom was a very successful software developer working on office applications. He was regarded as one of the experts in the area of Ashton-Tate's dBASE product line and related products. Several products are still named after Tom Rettig.

Tom Rettig was a major guru in the Fox community. To those of us who had the privilege of knowing him, he was a friend in the truest sense. Among Tom's accomplishments were TRO (a FrameWork and accounting application for FoxPro 2.X), and multiple other utilities that allowed development in FoxPro to be easier and faster. He participated in the "standardization" effort of the major after market product vendors during the FoxPro 2.x years.

Tom was a person whose stature in the community never interfered in his ability to meet and enjoy people. Many were the times that a new person to FoxPro would marvel at Tom's ability to make them feel important and a valuable contributor to the community knowledge.

Small in stature, but big in heart, Tom was born in Dec. 10, 1941 and died in Feb. 15, 1996 at the age of 54. See a "Program for Life" authored by the late Tom Rettig.