The Professional Association of Database Developers (PADD) played a significant role in my life from the late 1980s into the second half of this decade when it began to fall upon leaner times. I became leader of its New York FoxPro chapter for a few years and served on its Board of Directors during most of this period. Out of this involvement came numerous friendships and associations. None would affect my professional life more than my friendship and collaboration with Malcom Rubel.

At the time Mac was the author of, most recently, dBase IV Power Tools (Bantam Books, 1989) and a regular contributor to the leading PC database journals. Prior to his involvement with PCs, he had been Director of US Marketing for Perrier Mineral Water. At the time I first met him, he was working on a new book that eventually became FoxPro 2.0 Power Tools (Bantam Books, 1991). The book contained several hundred programming tools covering everything from dialog windows to metric conversion functions, and he asked me to help in the debugging of these tools. Eventually I ended up contributing a few of my own to the power tool library.

One day I came across a routine for evoking a series of standard FoxPro debugging routines while a program was running without terminating the program. Although the routine in question was very rudimentary, I thought it had possibilities and brought it to Mac's attention as a useful tool for our own debugging efforts on the power tools library.

When Mac's publisher decided to delay Mac's book to coincide with the release of FoxPro 2.0, we kept adding and refining the power tools library. At the same time we kept adding new levels of sophistication to our little debugging routine that wasn't so little any more. At some point a few months before the release of FP 2.0, we realized that we actually had created a marketable product without even realizing it. Mac came up with the name RAIDAR and we were on our way. RAIDAR was published as shareware 3 days after the release of FP 2.0 and was its first add on product.

RAIDAR went through several versions and soon abandoned its shareware status. I finally left the game after we perfected the FP 2.5 version for Windows, but Mac persevered through a final version compatible with Visual FoxPro 3.0.

I have included a copy of the manual for those who might be interested.

I have also included a full blown copy of the RAIDAR logo, Ugly Bug, by yours truly and which Mac claimed in a libelous way to be the product of an alchohol induced nightmare.