FileMaker can easily be used to create small, simple databases, such as personal contact lists or recipe files, but it has the power to enable complex enterprise-level relational systems as well. The first version to support Mac OS X, FileMaker Pro 5.5, was released in 2001, and version 6 was the last to support the Classic Mac OS.įileMaker’s appeal was the integration of the database engine with a forms-based GUI that made it much easier to implement databases than other software available – a distinction it has maintained ever since. FileMaker became a cross-platform app with Mac and Windows versions in 1992. Noashoba had three major revisions of FileMaker before the company was acquired by Apple to become part of its Claris* software division in 1986, at which point the software was renamed FileMaker II.
Two years later Microsoft discontinued its program. FileMaker went head-to-head with Microsoft File, then the dominant database app on the Mac, and within a year it matched its sales.
Learn a little bit of FileMaker’s history…įileMaker Pro is a cross-platform (Mac OS and Windows) relational database (RDBMS) application published by Apple subsidiary FileMaker Inc.īorn at Nashoba Systems, Concord, MA, in the early 1980s as Nutshell, a DOS-based database, it was adapted to the Macintosh with a graphical user interface in 1985.
