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.1 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 . One of RETRIEVE's users was the Jet Propulsion LaboratoryThe Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near Pasadena, California builds and operates unmanned spacecraft for NASA. JPL-run projects include the Galileo Jupiter mission and the Mars rovers, including the 1997 Mars Pathfinder and the twin 2003 Mars Exp, and in the late 1960s they asked one of their programmers, Jeb Long , to produce their own customized version. The result was JPLDIS (Jet Propulsion Laboratory Display Information System) which was written in the FORTRAN programming language and ran on their UNIVAC 1108The UNIVAC 1108 was the second member of Sperry Rand's UNIVAC 1100 series of computers, introduced in 1964. Integrated circuits replaced the thin film memory that the UNIVAC 1107 used for register storage. Smaller and faster cores were used for main memor mainframes.
In 1978Events January January 1 The Copyright Act of 1976 takes effect, making sweeping changes to United States copyright law. January 1 Air India's Boeing 747 explodes near Bombay 213 dead. January 4 Referendum in Chile supports policies of Augusto Pinochet., C. Wayne Ratliff , another programmer at JPL and friend of Jeb Long, wrote a database program in assembly languageAssembly language or simply assembly is a human-readable notation for the machine language that a specific computer architecture uses. Machine language, a pattern of bits encoding machine operations, is made readable by replacing the raw values with symbo for the CP/M operating system based on JPLDIS. He called it Vulcan, after Mr. SpockThis article is about the Star Trek character Mr. For the pediatrician Dr. Spock, see Benjamin Spock. For the Swedish synthpop band, see S. For the asteroid, see 2309 Mr. One of the most famous characters from the original Star Trek television series is t of Star TrekStar Trek collectively refers to six science fiction television series, ten motion pictures, and hundreds of novels, video games, and other works of fiction all set within the same fictional universe created by Gene Roddenberry in the early to mid 1960s.. 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.
