The date of the .exe of my version of Blackwell's Idealist database manager (version 3) is 17 November 1995, and so is twenty years old tomorrow. In that time, I have used the program on a daily basis, through every version of windows up to 7. It has never crashed and I have never lost a single piece of information, out of the thousands of records stored. I have often thought of migrating to another program, but the beauty of Idealist is that it just works, and keeps on working.

So Happy Birthday Idealist, and thank you.

Regards,
Geoffrey

It was - still is, clearly - one of the great DBMS. When we first launched our business, our entire (networked) in-house admin system was built on Idealist. Not the target use case, no, but the simple scripting and extreme speed of the application meant that combined with Word's mail-merge facilities (for producing invoices, orders, confirmation forms etc.), this was perfectly feasible. We kept that system running for about 10 years before finally migrating to FileMaker Pro (which didn't need Word).

Just checked the date of my version of Idealist 3: January 1999 (which I suspect makes it one of the last builds of that version). Definitely one of the great programs. Still going strong on a 64-bit version of Windows 10.

I fondly remember Idealist - I must have had it around that time 95 or 96, I think I got it free in a magazine. Is there a copy of it to be had on the interwebz?

Although not particularly active of late, there is a blog devoted to Idealist where the original set-up files (plus the manual) can still be downloaded:

http://osbloggery.blogspot.co.uk/2007/12/after-idealist.html

In fact http://osbloggery.blogspot.co.uk/ is my personal blog rather than a blog devoted to Idealist. There happen to be a few posts about Idealist on the blog because I am an Idealist addict. The set-up files for Idealist are not available on the blog, but I am happy to pass them on to folk who get in touch with me.

I'd love to get a working copy of the set-up file. [bob at bobmclain dot com].

I downloaded the v3 set-up files and manual from a Dropbox link someone posted on your blog, but could not install the software on Win 7. Maybe I'll have better luck with v5?

Thanks!

Lawrence Osborn wrote:

In fact http://osbloggery.blogspot.co.uk/ is my personal blog rather
than a blog devoted to Idealist. There happen to be a few posts about
Idealist on the blog because I am an Idealist addict. The set-up files
for Idealist are not available on the blog, but I am happy to pass them
on to folk who get in touch with me.

FWIW, Qercus is an updated, open-source alternative which the authors on sourceforge say was "inspired by" Idealist. From what I can recall of Idealist -- it's been about 18 years for me since I last used it -- it acts much the same.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/qercus/

I did use Qercus for a while, but didn't find the scripting side quite as intuitive as Idealist. But it was a valiant attempt at something very similar. Sadly seems to be languishing.