I was always a bit hazy on what these terms actually meant, and what we lost. It does seem like there was a brief golden age of easy "rapid application development" tools like FoxPro where you could wire some UI fields to a database without too much trouble. Now we have people trying to do the same in the web, badly.

I also had no idea what client/server meant (at the time). My current oversimplified distinction:

Workgroup: I/O thru file system, clients responsible for locking, concurrency, etc.

Client/Server: I/O thru DB's protocol (eg TDS), server responsible for locking, concurrency, etc.

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As for what was lost, I spent way too long (10+ years) trying to figure that out, trying to fulfill the desire to recover the ADO (Access Data Objects) programming paradigm. I think I succeeded, more or less, and am currently reorienting my life to work on it full-time.

I used to loathe FoxPro, now I actually miss it, it was simple enough to quickly get the job done. I have always thought in the 2000s that something better, more powerful and even easier to use would come. And looking back I felt a lot of times technologies general we reinvent the wheel and nothing better actually came out of it.

FileMaker may be an alternative, but I never understood why it hasn't caught on.

And I am not even sure if there are any product similar that is good on the Web.

I assume that's the windows 3.11 era? It was a simpler time, with small non-hostile networks, less critical software, and more humans in the loop. While 'workgroup' mostly means PC/DOS to me, the mainframes of the day had a comparable story unfolding.

Funny thing, I remember lot of similar apps in enterprise businesses until the late 2000s. That only started to change when web apps and cloud-hosted software became the norm.

Can you talk more about workgroup?

Not the GP, but I used to work in desktop development for enterprise businesses.

Most multi-user apps were two tiered: client and database. The way they worked was by connecting directly to the database and/or a shared filesystem in the local network. All validation happened client-side.

Database credentials and fine-grained file/directory permissions were the only security measures. That and the NAT. ;)

There's still software in the market that uses this model, like some niche ERPs from the 90s and software catered to small/mid businesses.

> Database credentials and fine-grained file/directory permissions were the only security measures. That and the NAT. ;)

It baffles me that the CCNA materials is still based around these use cases.