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DBase

Database management system

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  • 5 chapters

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Originally released as Vulcan for PTDOS in 1978, the CP/M port caught the attention of Ashton-Tate in 1980. They licensed it, re-released it as dBASE II, and later ported it to IBM PC computers running DOS. On the PC platform in particular, dBase became one of the best-selling software titles for a number of years. A major upgrade was released as dBase III and ported to a wider variety of platforms, including UNIX and VMS. By the mid-1980s, Ashton-Tate was one of the "big three" software publishers in the early business-software market, along with Lotus Development and Microsoft.

Starting in the mid-1980s, several companies produced their own variations on the dBase product and especially the dBase programming language. These included FoxBASE+ and its successor FoxPro, Clipper, and other so-called xBase products. Many of these were technically stronger than dBase, but could not push it aside in the market. This changed with the poor reception of dBase IV, whose design and stability were so lacking that many users switched to other products.

In the early 1990s, xBase products constituted the leading database platform for implementing business applications. The size and impact of the xBase market did not go unnoticed, and within one year, the three top xBase firms were acquired by larger software companies:

  • Borland purchased Ashton-Tate
  • Microsoft bought Fox Software
  • Computer Associates acquired Nantucket

Then the smaller, but still popular, xBase products were acquired as their parents ran into market challenges:

  • SubRosa Inc acquired VP-Info

By the opening decade of the 21st century, most of the original xBase products had faded from prominence and many had disappeared entirely. In 2022, products known as dBase still existed, owned by dBase LLC. The Register reported that dBase's website ceased to operate in 2026.

History

Origins

In the late 1960s, Fred Thompson at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) was using a Tymshare product named RETRIEVE to manage a database of electronic calculators, which were at that time very expensive products. In 1971, Thompson collaborated with Jack Hatfield, a programmer at JPL, to write an enhanced version of RETRIEVE, which became the JPLDIS project. JPLDIS was written in FORTRAN on the UNIVAC 1108 mainframe, and was presented publicly in 1973. When Hatfield left JPL in 1974, Jeb Long took over his role.

While working at JPL as a contractor, C. Wayne Ratliff entered the office football pool. He had no interest in the game as such, but felt he could win the pool by processing the post-game statistics found in newspapers. In order to do this, he turned his attention to a database system and, by chance, came across the documentation for JPLDIS. He used this as the basis for a port to PTDOS on his kit-built IMSAI 8080 microcomputer, and called the resulting system Vulcan (after the home planet of Mr. Spock on Star Trek).

Ashton-Tate

George Tate and Hal Lashlee had built two successful start-up companies: Discount Software, which was one of the first to sell PC software programs through the mail to consumers, and Software Distributors, which was one of the first wholesale distributors of PC software in the world. They entered into an agreement with Ratliff to market Vulcan, and formed Ashton-Tate (the name Ashton was chosen purely for marketing reasons) to do so. Ratliff ported Vulcan from PTDOS to CP/M. Hal Pawluk, who handled marketing for the nascent company, decided to change the name to the more business-like "dBASE". Pawluk devised the use of lower case "d" and all-caps "BASE" to create a distinctive name. Pawluk suggested calling the new product version two ("II") to suggest it was less buggy than an initial release. dBASE II was the result and became a standard CP/M application along with WordStar and SuperCalc.

In 1981, IBM commissioned a port of dBASE for the then-in-development PC. The resultant program was one of the initial pieces of software available when the IBM PC went on sale in the fall of 1981. dBASE was one of a few "professional" programs on the platform then, and became a huge success. The customer base included not only end-users, but an increasing number of "value added resellers", or VARs, who purchased dBASE, wrote applications with it, and sold the completed systems to their customers. The May 1983 release of dBASE II RunTime further entrenched dBASE in the VAR market by allowing the VARs to deploy their products using the lower-cost RunTime system.

Although some critics stated that dBASE was difficult to learn, its success created many opportunities for third parties. By 1984, more than 1,000 companies offered dBASE-related application development, libraries of code to add functionality, applications using dBASE II Runtime, consulting, training, and how-to books. A company in San Diego (today known as Advisor Media) premiered a magazine devoted to the professional use of dBASE, Data Based Advisor; its circulation exceeded 35,000 after eight months. Ashton-Tate said that addons covered "every area from hog farming to yacht racing". All of these activities fueled the rapid rise of dBASE as the leading product of its type; by early 1984 Ashton-Tate stated that it had sold more than 150,000 copies of dBASE II.

dBase III

As platforms and operating systems proliferated in the early 1980s, the company found it difficult to port the assembly language-based dBase to target systems. This led to a rewrite of the platform in the C programming language, using automated code conversion tools. The resulting code worked, but was essentially undocumented and inhuman in syntax due to the automated conversion, a problem that would prove to be serious in the future.

In May 1984, the rewritten dBase III was released. Although reviewers widely panned its lowered performance, the product was otherwise well reviewed. After a few rapid upgrades, the system stabilized and was once again a best-seller throughout the 1980s, and formed the famous "application trio" of PC compatibles (dBase, Lotus 123, and WordPerfect). By the fall of 1984, the company had over 500 employees and was taking in US$40 million a year in sales (equivalent to $124 million in 2025), the vast majority from dBase products.

Cloning

There was also an unauthorized clone of dBase III called Rebus in the Soviet Union. Its adaptation to the Russian language was reduced to the mechanical replacement of the name, the russification of the help files and the correction of the sorting tables for the Russian language.

dBase IV

Introduced in 1988, after delays, dBase IV had "more than 300 new or improved features". By then, FoxPro had made inroads, and even dBase IV's support for Query by Example and SQL were not enough. dBase IV added a built-in screen generator; in dBASE III and earlier, third party screen generators were available, including Luis Castro's ViewGen which was purchased by Fox Software and bundled with FoxPro 1.0 as FoxView.

Along the way, Borland, which had bought Ashton-Tate, brought out a revised dBase IV in 1992 but with a focus described as "designed for programmers" rather than "for ordinary users".

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