demo of the system showed a HyperCard stack querying a series of Baskin-Robbins databases, formerly impossible because each regional area used their own database servers which DAL now combined into one. Reorders for more stock could be made by dragging a series of ice cream scoops on a graphical display of the current warehoused inventory. The system was so impressive that it made other database vendors scramble to provide similar systems; Oracle Corporation immediately purchased PLUS from Spinnaker Software, releasing it first as Oracle Card, and then Oracle Media Objects. Other companies followed similar routes, and soon the event-driven database front-end was a standard feature of most systems. A number of other applications also used the system, perhaps ironically Microsoft's various Office products doing so with the most regularity. Other than that DAM support was fairly rare, and the product did not see widespread use. Perhaps much of this was due to the incomplete nature of the DAM system as a whole; the need for DAL middleware in most cases, and the lack of low-cost query document builders (there were some expensive ones) made the overhead of using DAM quite high. Work on DAM ended in the mid-1990s, and disappeared entirely sometime before the release of Mac OS X. A "classic" Mac OS version of ODBC was available for some time, although support was limited. Starting with the release of OS X 10.2 Jaguar, Apple started distributing a version of the iODBC cross-platform ODBC drivers. Starting with OS X 10.4 Tiger Apple has introduced a new and much "higher level" system known as Core Data. Core Data allows developers to serialize data into SQLite for processing, similar in concept to ODBC when used with a non-SQL data source. External links Data Access Manager Developing with Core Data Macintosh operating systems development Classic Mac OS programming tools