From: jmckee@world.std.com (Jim McKee)
Subject: Re: Odesta's Double Helix
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
Distribution: usa
Date: Wed, 23 Dec 1992 01:31:44 GMT

In article <1992Dec22.223620.8948@news.acns.nwu.edu> geek@casbah.acns.nwu.edu (Myrland Gray) writes:
>In article <1992Dec21.003958.20064@ultb.isc.rit.edu> jek5036@ultb.isc.rit.edu (J.E. King) writes:
>>
>>Seems as though everybody uses Filemaker Pro 2.0v2 and 4th Dimension.. Some
>>people have mentioned FoxBase/Mac.. what ever happened to Double Helix?
>>How do people feel about DH?  As a consultant I recommend DH for most
>>applications because of it's flexibility and power.  Other comments on DH?
>
>First of all, Odesta Corporation went out of business almost a year ago, and
>the Double Helix product line was purchased and a new company called Helix
>Technologies was started to continue to support and develop Double Helix. Just
>recently, the next generation of Double Helix (called "Helix Express") was 
>released which included all sorts of new features (that I won't go into now)
>and some much-needed bug fixes.
>
>Now that that's cleared up...my comments about Helix. Don't bother. Helix can't
>do anything that any (if not every) other Mac database can't do. Much (~50%) of
>Helix's source is almost 10 years old and completely unintelligible to humans.
>As more and more changes happen in the Machintosh world, Helix gets further and
>further out of date - with little or no chance of ever catching up. The 
>management at Helix Technologies can't seem to grasp the concept that the world
>around them is changing and they need to take their blinders off and at least 
>try to get back in the race. 
>
>PS - If you couldn't tell, I have a disliking of the company because of the way
>I was (and still am) treated. I used to work on Helix, both before and after 
>Odesta went down in flames. Never have I seen a more talented, yet severly
>misguided group of individuals.


Everyone has their own slant on this, and I am not disagreeing with Joey
Gray. However, that said, the value of a program depends on what the user
needs it to do. I believe that most people aren't running Fortune 500
companies, and also, they don't want to have to learn a database programming
language to get a system up-and-running to drive their small business,
non-profit or organization. Helix is an extremely powerful relational
database that is extraordinarily easy for non-programmers to work with.
Easy doesn't mean "wimpish." True, I would not want to run an airline
with it. But, again, for most people, it's probably actually more than
they need. And, it works. I trust my data (which equals my business
survival) to this program, and have for 6 years. And, I have found the
folks at Odesta (now Helix Technologies) extremely helpful and responsive.
Once when I needed a way to suppress Totals fields from printing on each
page of a report, a guy at Odesta stayed late on a Friday to create a
relation containing examples of how to do this, and sent it out to me
Fedex -> I had it on Monday morning. I haven't ever seen THAT kind of
user support in any other company I have dealt with.

So, for people who are advanced programmers, developers, or whatever,
Helix Express may not be your bag. But, for us folks who don't give a
damn (or much of one) about why or how a program does what it does,
Helix Express just plain works.

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Jim McKee                    \  "The reward is in the journey."
jmckee@world.std.com         /  On the Red Road with my brothers and all my
jmckee@silver.lcs.mit.edu    \  relations. Ho! Mitakuye Oyasin
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Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.databases