When modern computers became a reality in 1950s, they were installed in places where they needed management of large lists, catalogs or books. If you want to have an idea about those times, then you can try watching an old movie from 1957 called Desk Set. As you can guess, in this movie they install a huge computer (desk set) in the building for the management of books.
There were many ways they were managing the databases all those years ago but the first database system that became popular was dBase. Starting from 1979 to the late 90s, dBase dominated the database applications. But now much more robust RDBMS have replaced dBase almost everywhere.
If you still have dBase format database files lying somewhere, then you can use a freeware CONVERT to convert the dBase database to other formats like CSV and SDF. In fact this software allows you to convert any of these database formats (dBase, CSV and SDF) into any other. Furthermore, it can also be used to clean or modify an existing database file while keeping its original format.
The user interface of CONVERT is not very complicated. You simply have to follow one box at a time – input file, output file, sorting and filters. In the input box, we can choose the input database file along with its database type. In the output file box, we have to choose the database format in which the output is saved along with many options. We can also choose the character set to be changed such as ANSI or ASCII.
Depending on the size of the source database files, the conversion time taken also changes. For a very small database containing only a few hundred entries, CONVERT can finish all the conversions in just a few seconds. For very huge databases, it is going to take longer.
CONVERT is a specialized software for conversion of old database files into much more modern formats. It does not support many other database types such as SQLite but does the claimed job satisfactorily.
You can download CONVERT from https://www.killetsoft.de/p_cona_e.htm.