The short "DATAFLEX" History - and how did it start ?

RDE was founded in May 1974 and renamed into RDE GmbH in April 1982. The RDE Software Team did start with the Miami/Florida Software product DATAFLEX evaluation and development in April 1983. The Serial-Number of our own 1.61 licence for the American Molecular N-Star Multiuser Operating System was # 237 and dated from 11.Sep.1983. We keep this huge floppy for our museum.

At that time 1986, RDE concentrated the most know-how in programming DataFlex business applications on the German market. In 1987 RDE did publish its own very well known book "DataFlex Professional", a fully German 2.3b Reference Manual, where the total syntax and every command was explained with self designed and extensively checked and described samples.

This German 2.3b Reference Manual from a German company did break the barrier for many programmers, knowing that there is an extreemly strong German support. RDE did sell more than 2.100 books of its own Reference Manual up to 1999, and we did sell to Germany as well as to Austria, Netherlands, Poland, Hungary, Italy and Switzerland and very interesting, the last ones were sold to Russia in late 1999.

From 1989 on, we did follow up all comming DataFlex 3.0 beta´s, at the end more than 12 versions, each one more different to the last one than the next one. It was a crazy time around 1990 not to have any "Windows" product to sell.

We did keep all these floppies up to now and we did dream about classes, methods, groups, procedures and whatever else was announced.

When DataFlex 2.3b has had its zenith in 1991, the German RDE company did serve about 350 software- and systems houses as customers in the German speaking part of Europe.

When Data Access did establish its own new Frankfurt office in 1990 with a very well known little chaotic freak as a general manger, the sales to German speaking countries did break down every day, down to a joke. At the end, the guy was fired in late 1993. It was one of the grates mistakes of teh CEO, Charles Casanave III.

In 1994 RDE did cancel and stop all DataFlex activities, because in Germany, the name DataFlex was finally down, the image of the Frankfurt Office was terrible and at the end, it was truly negative to be in touch with that German division of Data Access.

The new and last manager, an old friend of us, did a lot of work to get the customers back. But he did never reach the success from the old days. And at the final end, the German office of Data Access was closed forever at the end of year 2000.

Well, we should not forget, that the DOS users generation of DataFlex did slightly move (down) to Windows from 1992 on and allDOS applications did totally collaps in 1996 , when WIN95 was well established.

But there was no acceptable follow up product, not DataFlex 3.x, not PowerFlex, not Delphi from Borland, not Gupta or Sybase with its Developing System and most of the remaining application development software companies died from 1996 up to 2000.

Changing from developing software to serving LAN´s, Network´s, foundig our Internet Division "IPW", RDE and EltroData did survive with some other companies and now, we are comming back to the roots.

The provider business was growing a lot and we did successfully step into the LINUX server market with MYSQL and PHP3 up to PHP5. Currently (Jan 2005) we are doing applications based on TYPO3 CMS (content management system) and, staying well on more than one leg, we are servicing and selling used DLT Libraries and S-DLT and LTO solutions.