history

Prior to the introduction of Access, Borland (with Paradox and dBase) and Fox (with FoxPro) dominated the desktop database market. Microsoft Access was the first mass-market database program for Windows. With Microsoft's purchase of FoxPro in 1992 and the incorporation of Fox's Rushmore query optimization routines into Access, Microsoft Access quickly became the dominant database for Windows—effectively eliminating the competition which failed to transition from the MS-DOS world.^[3]

Project OmegaEdit

Microsoft's first attempt to sell a relational database product was during the mid 1980s, when Microsoft obtained the license to sell R:Base.^[4] In the late 1980s Microsoft developed its own solution codenamed Omega.^[5] It was confirmed in 1988 that a database product for Windows and OS/2 was in development.^[6][7] It was going to include the "EB" Embedded Basic language,^[5] which was going to be the language for writing macros in all Microsoft applications,^[8] but the unification of macro languages did not happen until the introduction of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). Omega was also expected to provide a front end to the Microsoft SQL Server.^[9] The application was very resource-hungry, and there were reports that it was working slowly on the 386 processors that were available at the time.^[10] It was scheduled to be released in the 1st quarter of 1990,^[11] but in 1989 the development of the product was reset^[4][12] and it was rescheduled to be delivered no sooner than in January 1991.^[13] Parts of the project were later used for other Microsoft projects: Cirrus (codename for Access) and Thunder (codename for Visual Basic, where the Embedded Basic engine was used).^[4][5] After Access's premiere, the Omega project was demonstrated in 1992 to several journalists and included features that were not available in Access.^[14]

Project Cirrus

After the Omega project was scrapped, some of its developers were assigned to the Cirrus project (most were assigned to the team which created Visual Basic).^[4] Its goal was to create a competitor for applications like Paradox or dBase that would work on Windows.^[15] After Microsoft acquired FoxPro, there were rumors that the Microsoft project might get replaced with it,^[16] but the company decided to develop them in parallel. It was assumed that the project would make use of Extensible Storage Engine (Jet Blue)^[17] but, in the end, only support for Microsoft Jet Database Engine (Jet Red) was provided.  

The project used some of the code from both the Omega project and a pre-release version of Visual Basic.^[5] In July 1992, betas of Cirrus shipped to developers^[18] and the name Access became the official name of the product.^[19] "Access" was originally used for an older terminal emulation program from Microsoft. Years after the program was abandoned, they decided to reuse the name here.^[20]

TimelineEdit

1992: Microsoft released Access version 1.0 on November 13, 1992, and an Access 1.1 release in May 1993 to improve compatibility with other Microsoft products and to include the Access Basic programming language.

1994: Microsoft specified the minimum hardware requirements for Access v2.0 as: Microsoft Windows v3.1 with 4 MB of RAM required, 6 MB RAM recommended; 8 MB of available hard disk space required, 14 MB hard disk space recommended. The product shipped on seven 1.44 MB diskettes. The manual shows a 1994 copyright date.

As a part of the Microsoft Office 4.3 Professional with Book Shelf, Microsoft Access 2.0 was included with first sample databases "NorthWind Trader" which covered every possible aspect of programming your own database. The Northwind Traders sample first introduced the Main Switchboard features new to Access 2.0 for 1994. The photo of Andrew Fuller, record #2 of that sample database was the individual that presented and worked with Microsoft to provide such an outstanding example database.

With Office 95, Microsoft Access 7.0 (a.k.a. "Access 95") became part of the Microsoft Office Professional Suite, joining Microsoft Excel, Word, and PowerPoint and transitioning from Access Basic to VBA. Since then, Microsoft has released new versions of Microsoft Access with each release of Microsoft Office. This includes Access 97 (version 8.0), Access 2000 (version 9.0), Access 2002 (version 10.0), Access 2003 (version 11.5), Access 2007 (version 12.0), Access 2010 (version 14.0), and Access 2013 (version 15.0).