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DBASE

dBASE was the first widely used database application for microcomputers, published by Ashton-Tate for CP/M, and later on the Apple II, Apple Macintosh and IBM PC under DOS where it became one of the best-selling software titles for a number of years. dBASE was never able to transition successfully to Microsoft Windows and was eventually displaced by newer products like Paradox, Clipper, and FoxPro. Ashton-Tate was later sold to Borland in 1991, which sold the rights to the product line in 1999 to the newly-formed dBASE Inc.

History

dBASE's history can be traced back to the mid-1960s in the form of a system called RETRIEVE, which was marketed by Tymshare Corporation. RETRIEVE was used by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and in the late 1960s they asked one of their programmers, Jeb Long, to produce their own version. The result was JPLDIS (Jet Propulsion Laboratory Display Information System) which was written in the FORTRAN programming language and ran on their UNIVAC 1108 mainframes.

In 1978, C. Wayne Ratliff, another programmer at JPL and friend of Jeb Long, wrote a database program in assembly language for the CP/M operating system, that was based on Jeb Long's JPLDIS. (Note that this later led to the undoing of Ashton-Tate during a suit with Fox Software when it was revealed that JPL, not Ashton-Tate owned the intellectual property rights upon which it was based, so Fox had as much right to the IP as Ashton-Tate!) He called it Vulcan, after Mr. Spock of Star Trek. This program was written to help him win the football pool at the office. After more work, and successfully using it to do his taxes, he felt it might have some commercial potential.

In October 1979, and for four or five months thereafter, the first quarter-page ad for Vulcan appeared in BYTE magazine, selling for US$50 per copy. The response, while not huge, was more than he could handle. By the summer of 1980 the stress of working his day job while handling all the orders as they came in (typing out the order, filling out the invoice, packaging the program, making a fresh copy of the disk, etc.) was too much, and he decided to stop marketing it altogether, and only support those who had purchased it up to that time.

A professor at the University of Washington and his wife were considering taking over marketing when George Tate and Hal Lashlee went to see Ratliff and a demo of Vulcan. George and Hal already had a business called Discount Software, with one employee. They made an offer for exclusive marketing rights, and Wayne accepted. This arrangement continued for about two or three years.

dBASE II, the first version

The dates in this section are a bit fuzzy, due to conflicting sources.

In August of 1980, Tate and Lashlee formed a new company called Software Plus which was later renamed to Ashton-Tate to market the database. (There was nobody named Ashton among the shareholders nor among the employees, but George felt that Ashton-Tate sounded better than Ratliff-Tate. There was later a parrot named Ashton that lived in the lunchroom as the unofficial mascot.) Vulcan was renamed to dBASE II, knowing that version one of anything never sells very well, and Tate told Ratliff that he thought that Vulcan would sell better at US$695, so the price was raised. One source lists November of 1981 as the date when Ashton-Tate began selling dBase II.

Jeb Long, author of JPLDIS and one of the founders of Ashton-Tate, together with Wayne Ratliff then started a port to the 16-bit IBM PC, which was released as dBASE-II 2.3 in August 1982. The initial version was quite buggy, but the problems were addressed and dBASE-II went on to become one of the killer apps on the PC.

dBASE III

Another source reports that in about 1982-83, the company purchased the marketing rights, copyrights and technology (so they thought!) from Ratliff, hiring him as the vice president of new technology. Ratliff was later the project manager for dBASE III, as well as designer and lead programmer. Long was also hired about this time, and worked there for 8 years. He was known as the guru of the dBASE products at Ashton-Tate, and was the architect of the dBASE language and responsible for its components for all versions of dBASE III and dBASE IV, with the exception of the initial dBASE version.

By 1983 the company was so successful that they did an IPO.

The original versions of dBASE were all coded directly in assembly language, but as the program grew the decision was made to re-write the next version, a major upgrade, in the C programming language. This proved to be fatefull; while dBASE-III, released in June 1984, ran acceptably on newer machines, it was too slow on older PC's and most customers ignored it. Additional releases of the II product continued while they worked on the performance problems, eventually addressing most of them by late 1985.

Around 1986 Ashton-Tate caught "Mac fever" and started developing a full suite of Macintosh applications. They purchased a small company called Ann Arbor Softworks who were busy working on "high-end" business applications, and eventually released their spreadsheet called Full Impact, a word processor called FullWrite Professional, and, of course, a database called dBASE Mac.

FullWrite and FullImpact followed earlier patterns and were released filled with bugs, running slow on common hardware, as well as being over two years late. The products never sold well, with good reason, and Ashton-Tate soon gave up on the whole project, adbandoning FullWrite just as it appeared to be maturing into a powerful system. FullWrite was later resurrected in 1994 by an enterprising 3rd party, but by that time Microsoft Word had taken over the entire market.

dBASE Mac was utterly unlike their PC products, including a full GUI that made some complex tasks much easier, as well as offering a full GUI editor for data input. The program was generally lauded as the right way to do a database, but with no ability to share data with their PC versions it had to compete with other Mac-only databases such as 4th Dimension, Helix and FileMaker which were even better. After throwing in the towel they decided to release a direct port of then-current dBASE-III complete with a DOS interface.

dBASE IV

dBASE-IV was released in October 1988 and was incredibly buggy. Sales started to slump, notably due to the presence of dBASE clones such as FoxBase and Clipper. The company was soon insolvent, and was purchased by Borland in 1991. The problems with dBASE-IV were eventually fixed, and it was also ported to a number of "high end" platforms such as the Sun SPARC, IBM's AIX and DEC's VMS. dBASE-IV remained their primary product until early 1993.

dBASE 5

dBASE 5.0 returned to their roots with a pure-PC version available both on DOS and Windows. By this point, 1993, dBASE's market share was plumetting. Borland eventually decided sales were small enough to stop production, but instead sold the rights to dBASE Inc., a small company dedicated to keeping the product alive. Although dBASE Inc. continues to release new versions of the dBASE platform--including an object oriented update for Windows platforms called dBASE Plus--dBASE is no longer a force in the database software market, and does not compete with products subscribing to the SQL standard.

Description

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See also

• dBASE programming language