Vendor lineage
Ashton-Tate - dBASE II and III
A football-pool database written in 8080 assembly became dBASE II, 70 per cent of the microcomputer database market, and one of the Big Three; then dBASE IV shipped too early.
Ashton-Tate was founded in August 1980 by George Tate and Hal Lashlee, two software entrepreneurs who had already built three start-ups - a mail-order seller, a distributor and a retail chain - and who in 1981 discovered Vulcan, a database application that Martin Marietta programmer Wayne Ratliff had written in 1978, in Intel 8080 assembly language for CP/M, to help him pick football pools, modelled on JPLDIS, a Univac program from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. They licensed it on a one-page agreement with generous royalties and sold it as dBASE II; Ashton was Tate's parrot, named after the fact, and the founders thought Ashton-Tate sounded better than Lashlee-Tate.
dBASE II cost $700 and came with an unusual guarantee: a crippled version to try and a sealed disk with the full one, returnable unopened within thirty days. It was ported to the IBM PC and shipped in September 1982, and as hard drives grew it became one of the first database products to sell in volume; by early 1984 InfoWorld reckoned Ashton-Tate the world's sixth-largest microcomputer software company on $35 million of 1983 sales, with dBASE II reportedly holding 70 per cent of the microcomputer database market, 150,000 copies sold, a catalogue of 700 applications written in its language and more than thirty books and courses teaching it. PC Magazine said the share would be the envy of Procter & Gamble or General Motors.
dBASE III was announced in May and shipped in July 1984, alongside Framework, the integrated office suite Forefront Corporation developed with Ashton-Tate's money; a company-wide convention aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach presented them in early August. Days later, on 10 August 1984, George Tate died of a heart attack at forty. David Cole, the chairman and chief executive the founders had hired in 1981, resigned that October for Ziff-Davis, and Ed Esber, the marketer who had launched VisiCalc, took over; dBASE III 1.1 followed in November to fix the bugs in 1.0, and Ratliff, whose relationship with Esber was tumultuous, quit months later.
Esber's seven years were the most prosperous and the most controversial. dBASE III Plus was 63 per cent of fiscal 1987 revenue, a customer called it essentially a one-product company, and Esber admitted it was perceived as a technological laggard: dBASE, MultiMate and Framework were all acquisitions, and dBASE went 22 months without an update. dBASE IV 1.0 shipped in October 1988 to good reviews until users found the bugs; Esber conceded in August 1989 that it had shipped too early, and 1.1 did not arrive until July 1990. By then the xBase clones - FoxBASE+ and FoxPro, and Nantucket's Clipper compiler - had the developers.
Borland bought the company in September 1991 for stock, and in the same year Microsoft bought Fox Software and Computer Associates bought Nantucket: the three top xBase firms taken within twelve months. The Justice Department later required Borland to end its suit against Fox and let others use the dBASE language. The dBASE and Clipper glossary entries carry the language; this record carries the company that made a programming language out of a hobbyist's database and lost it to the people who compiled it better.
This company no longer trades under this name. Now part of Borland, which bought Ashton-Tate in 1991 and is itself now part of OpenText.
- Wikipedia: Ashton-Tate - founded August 1980 by George Tate and Hal Lashlee in Torrance, California; Wayne Ratliff's Vulcan of 1978 in 8080 assembly, modelled on JPLDIS; the 1981 licence and the parrot; the $700 price and the sealed-disk guarantee; the IBM PC port shipped September 1982; $35 million in 1983 and 70 per cent of the market; dBASE III announced May and shipped July 1984 with Framework; the Queen Mary convention; Tate's death on 10 August 1984; Cole's resignation and Ed Esber; dBASE III 1.1; Ratliff's departure; dBASE III Plus at 63 per cent of fiscal 1987; dBASE IV 1.0 October 1988, 1.1 July 1990; sold to Borland September 1991, defunct October 1991 (read 2026-10-06)
- Wikipedia: dBase - Vulcan for PTDOS 1978; the CP/M port that caught Ashton-Tate's attention in 1980; dBASE II and the IBM PC; dBASE III ported to Unix and VMS; the Big Three with Lotus and Microsoft; FoxBASE+, FoxPro and Clipper; the poor reception of dBASE IV; within one year Borland bought Ashton-Tate, Microsoft bought Fox Software and Computer Associates acquired Nantucket; the Justice Department and the xBase language; dBase LLC in 2022 (read 2026-10-06)