Today, because of web technologies such as Flash and AJAX, interactive, animated, multimedia interfaces to database applications have become ubiquitous. Every day, millions of people use multimedia interfaces at Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, MapQuest and other sites to access databases. Nearly 20 years ago, I led the design and creation of a product called FileFlex which was the first and at one time the most popular commercial PC database designed for multimedia applications. It’s popularity was in large part due to the fact that it worked with the Director the market pioneer in multimedia. You may have actually used FileFlex without knowing as it was the defacto standard for CD-ROM products during the 90’s. It spawned a small niche of competitive products and helped many people implement ideas that had previously been unattainable.

Many people are aware of Macromedia’s(now Adobe) innovative role in the emergence of multimedia presentations with their Director product, but few know how these presentations evolved into multimedia application interfaces. As one reviewer so clearly stated:

Director has some amazing interactive media presentation capabilities. It would be an ideal front-end development tool except for one problem: it has no data storage mechanism.
Glenn Picher - originally published in the Lingo User’s Journal

In 1989 I had drawn the same conclusion and set out to create a solution which became FileFlex. At that time I was Director of Product Development for GUI Inc. a company founded and led by Dan Shafer who had built an incredible reputation in the Macintosh community with his Hypertalk Programming book and other publications. Dan and I shared a common vision for putting multimedia interfaces on traditional business applications. We were working on a project for Macromind(which became Macromedia) developing demos for the release of their ground-breaking Director multimedia development tool. Dan and I came up with an idea for a real-estate application which was an interactive, animated map of housing starts and pricing in the S.F. Bay area. Data for the application was stored in the then industry standard dBASE format. At the time some very limited programming utilities existed for accessing dBASE files from HyperCard which were usable from within Director. The initial prototype for the demo was put together using some of these “XCMD” utilities, but it was clear that they would not be sufficient to build the kind of real-world business applications I envisioned. Being a long time dBASE developer and VAR I knew there were C libraries for accessing dBASE files and began to search for one which would be suitable for our needs - complete access to and manipulation of dBASE data and index files, compatibility with Macintosh compilers *and* reasonable license terms. That was a tall order in that day, but developing such a library from scratch was out of the question both budget and schedule wise. Fortunately, CodeBase fit the bill.

After I developed the architecture and specifications, we hired a brilliant programmer named Dennis Chan to implement the low-level interface to CodeBase in C. I wrote the high-level Director/Lingo scripts which utilized that interface thereby making a full range of database capabilities available to multimedia application developers for the first time. The demonstration application was successfully implemented. Macromind Founder and President Marc Canter was quite excited by this application as were a number of attendees. Clearly there was demand for such enabling technology so GUI refined this tool and turned it into a product called FileFlex. After version 1.3.7, it was bought by Zatz(formerly Component Enterprises) which made extensive improvements and by version 2.0 had licensed a special version to Macromedia for inclusion in Director 5. This history can be found on the FileFlex site.

At it’s peak, FileFlex 3 was described as “The Fastest, Most Powerful, Most Compatible Embedded Relational Database Engine for Multimedia and the Internet”. When we first presented the idea of multimedia interfaces to business database applications, some wondered why, others said it wasn’t possible or practical. Today, approaching two decades later it’s not only become a staple on the web, but is expanding into all aspects of computer interfaces. It was a very rewarding experience to have had a tiny hand in helping that along.