Nantucket Corp, perversely based on the other side of the country in Culver City, California, legendary home of MGM, is preparing to launch McMax, a relational database management system for Apple Computer’s Macintosh that the company says is fully compatible with Ashton-Tate Inc’s dBase. Applications written in either the dBase language or in McMax will run interchangeably on either a Macintosh running McMax or an IBM Personal or Personalike running dBase II or III. The program is claimed to handle database files as large as 63Mb, and files with up to 16m records; as many as 10 separate files can be open at any one time and each can have seven active index files. Records can store up to 32Kb with up to 2,000 fields. Formatted data can also be transferred between McMax and Microsoft Word and File; ASCII file formats can be used for transfers. McMax will go for $295 and is due ship in February. Nantucket’s main product up to now has been a compiler for dBase confusingly called Clipper.
