FileMaker History

Home > History > Recent Years > Back In Time > 3rd Decade Back

• 1990
Version 1.0 - FileMaker Pro appeared for the first time, Macintosh only and included many of the tools we still use today. For fun we ran up version 1.0 in Classic mode in Mac OS X and it appeared to run fine, in fact better than version 4.1, where we've experienced some redraw problems. Amongst the included facilities were:
Form and list layouts
Header, footer, body, sub-summary and trailing grand summary parts
Most of the tools that are still available on the toolbar
Define Scripts was in place of ScriptMaker with Define Button immediately below this in the menu
Access Privileges including Define Groups, Define Passwords and Overview

With Slide Objects, Tab Order, Sort, Find, Alignment and most drawing tools all present, it demonstrated how advanced the initial product was.

• 1980s
This is when our memories and available information gets hazy. The dates of software releases are fairly clear, with Claris releasing FileMaker II in 1988, which was preceded by releases of FileMaker 4 and FileMaker Plus v2.1 from Nashoba (who owned FileMaker before Claris) . The original FileMaker v1.0 was released by Forethought Inc back in April 1985, which by coincidence was the year some of us were introduced to a peculiar little square beige box called an Apple Macintosh!