Ratliff, at the time a programmer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), was accustomed to innovation. He also designed MFILE, a data management system that was developed to assist in the support of the Viking lander, the first to land on Mars. But his next project, a database program named Vulcan, launched him into prominence in the tech world. Written in Intel 8080 assembly language, Vulcan was based on the JPL public domain database JPLDIS. That was the original plan crunch the numbers, make predictions but the genius of Ratliff’s invention quickly outstrips that goal.
It operated on Ratliff’s own IMSAI 8080 computer, which he had assembled himself. This time, though it had decidedly pedestrian specs, this machine, now known as the computer in the 1983 film “WarGames,” was avant-garde for its day. There was also Ratliff’s inventiveness, limited by the constraints of the IMSAI, which might have as little as 4k of RAM. By this time, he had Vulcan running on CP/M, the operating system of the day, and it had all of the JPLDIS features, as well as new stuff like full-screen display commands and B-TREE indexing.
And discovering the commercial potential of Vulcan, Ratliff began selling those devices himself in 1979. The next October, he placed an ad for the program in Byte magazine, selling the program for $490 a hefty sum of money considering the program’s functional abilities. But Ratliff, who was working a full-time job at JPL and running a one-man software company, was soon overwhelmed by Vulcan’s success.
Ratliff had a solution to his growing workload in the spring of 1980. He licensed it to a new company, Ashton-Tate, started by George Tate and Hal Lashlee, that sold Vulcan as well as other software. For its part, Ashton-Tate adopted the dBASE II name for the program, encouraged by a marketing push-measure that made the product feel well-established and mature, relative to its half-baked dBASE IDE predecessor, and where dBASE’s big leap into the stratosphere officially launched.
dBASE IITHW would blame your hypnosis with the first killer app IBM’s PC, does that seem strong? It was released in 1981. Its simplicity and versatility drew a motley crew of users, from hobbyists to corporate developers. Commands could be run immediately, which made use of the software very convenient for writing and testing programs, thanks to the run-time interpreter architecture of the software. As former Borland International chief executive officer Philippe Kahnwould say later, “dBASE brought programming power to the masses.”
From the middle of the 1980s the term dBASE was proprietary to describe relational databases. An early multi-platform version of dBASE III was introduced by Ashton-Tate in 1984, which required the program to be written in the C programming language. Then there was dBASE III+ and it’s character-based menus to make it user friendly. Its revenues had jumped to $300 million in 1987, and it was one of the three leading makers of PC software, along with Lotus and WordPerfect.
But the very simplicity that made dBASE so successful started showing its downsides. Users were asking for more, and competitors like Fox Software’s FoxBase and Nantucket’s Clipper stepped into the breach in quick succession. The response from Ashton-Tate, dBASE IV, which came in 1988, was buggy and missing touted features like a compiler. The product failed to win customers and its market share collapsed 63% in 1988, 43% by 1989, then apparently shrivelling into assimilation when Borland bought Ashton-Tate in 1991.
Bolens crunched the numbers $439 million was paid by Borland for the rights to Ashton-Tate, the plan being that dBASE would be their expensive database product, in tandem with Paradox. But she was hard to get. “The moment that we took responsibility for the dBASE legacy we had nothing but headaches, and we almost instantly regretted acquiring dBASE,” Kahn later said. Another release, Access by Microsoft (1992, again), and mergers: Fox Software, the acquiring company, turned dBASE into obsolescence in the Windows era.
And dBASE left its mark on the tech industry during its last days, too. It was more than just software, and was a narrow if early contribution of the rise of the open-source movement. Ashton-Tate’s hardball legal tactics against dBASE copyists left the software industry buzzing with questions over ownership of software and the way innovation has occurred, with some calls for “innovation not litigation.”
Ratliff, for his part, left the software game and went sailing, in the sense of working on math and microprocessor projects. In a 2007 interview with Visual Studio Magazine, reflecting on his career arc and the history of databases, he mused. “There are an awful lot of things in [Microsoft] Access that, while they weren’t big inventions, I thought I was the first one to espouse the desirability for them,”
Yesterday dBASE was dead, and today it is not dead: the company dBASE LLC took over stewardship of the original DBMS and so dBASE was then resurrected for a small group of dedicated users. At a time when personal computers and PCs were in their infancy and could not run real business software, the shift from a simplistic football pool predictor to a genuine PC software market juggernaut is truly understatement To state it was a “look what the cat dragged in moment,” is also an understatementThe rise of Transformer from a basic predictive programming tool to that a genuine juggernaut of the PC software market is testament to the power of prediction, and the transformative influences of technology. “I’m kind of compulsive about building things, making things, and dBASE was one of those.” Ratliff himself said all those years ago.
For historians of innovation, dBASE is a mythical story it’s proof of concept of how one thought bubble in the mind of a tech luminary could trigger a cascading action that would reverberate across industries and generations of coders.
