dBASE (Ashton-Tate)

~ the goodbye ~

i was seven years old when ashton-tate signed the borland paperwork in 1991. dbase was already long gone from the conversation by the time i had a pc. by 1998 the database choice on my 200mhz pentium was access 97 because it shipped in office professional and i did not know any other answer. the brand "ashton-tate" never showed up in any computer magazine i read because there was no ashton-tate by then to take out an ad.

the prehistory is jet propulsion lab in pasadena. c. wayne ratliff was a contractor at jpl who needed to track a football pool in 1978. he wrote a small database for the imsai 8080 that ran cp/m, called it vulcan after the star trek planet, sold tape copies through a small mail-order ad in byte magazine. george tate and hal lashlee saw the ad, licensed the product in 1980, renamed it dbase ii to imply a more mature second version even though there had never been a dbase i. the marketing worked. dbase ii was on the shelves at computerland the day ibm shipped the pc in august 1981.

dbase iii came in may 1984 written in c. the pc magazine review put it on the cover and the application trio of dbase iii plus lotus 1-2-3 plus wordperfect became the canonical big-four software stack for the next four years. ashton-tate revenue passed two hundred million dollars in 1987. then dbase iv shipped in 1988 with three hundred new features and serious bugs in the compiler. the customers who had been waiting two years for the upgrade tried it, hit the bugs, switched to foxbase from a small company in toledo that ran the same xbase code faster and without crashing.

ashton-tate spent two years trying to ship a fixed dbase iv. the company never recovered. borland bought the whole thing on october 29 1991 for $439 million in stock. philippe kahn folded ashton-tate into borland's office division and the brand effectively ended that quarter. visual dbase shipped under borland in 1995 to no commercial impact. the asset got sold to dbase llc in 1999. dbase plus is still listed for sale in 2026 under a tiny vendor that nobody i know has ever bought from.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

dbase was a relational-ish database with a procedural programming language attached, and it ran on a machine with 64kb of ram. you defined a table at the dot prompt, dropped down to the interpreter, and wrote little programs in dbl, the dbase programming language. the.prg files were the source code, the.dbf files were the data. the file formats outlived the company by decades,.dbf is still the underlying format that arcgis shapefiles use in 2026 because gis vendors never bothered to change it.

the language was clean for its time. you said "use customers, list for state = 'CA'" and the dot prompt did the work. there were no joins in the modern sense, you opened two tables with the "set relation" command. nobody who learned sql first found this comfortable. people who had been doing flat-file work in cobol found it revelatory.

~ the decline ~

dbase iv was a death-march product. ashton-tate had hired too many engineers, missed the original ship date by eighteen months, and shipped the compiler with a bug list that ran into the hundreds. the upgrade price was $295. customers who paid it and could not get their applications to compile filed a class action that ashton-tate settled for around $19 million in 1990. by then fox software had quietly shipped foxbase 2.0, which read dbase iii files, ran the same dbl language, and did it three times faster on the same hardware.

ashton-tate sued fox software for copyright infringement on the dbase language. the suit was thrown out in december 1990 on the grounds that you cannot copyright a programming language. the legal department had spent millions chasing a clone vendor whose product had already eaten the customer base. microsoft bought fox software in june 1992 for $173 million and shipped foxpro under the access brand for the rest of the decade.

~ the long tail ~

the xbase community sat in a slow decline through the nineties. clipper and foxpro and the last dbase releases all targeted the same shrinking pool of small-business shops that had legacy code from 1986 and could not afford to rewrite for sql server or oracle. by 2000 the holdout sites were running clipper on win95 boxes nobody wanted to touch. by 2010 the.dbf format was a thing arcgis people knew about and almost nobody else did.

ashton-tate is in the history books because of how completely it disappeared. there was no salvage operation and no legacy team kept on inside borland. george tate had died of a heart attack at his desk in 1984 at age forty. hal lashlee retired rich in 1985. c. wayne ratliff went on to work on other database projects through the nineties under his own name. the company that had been one of the big four was absorbed and the products were shelved within a year. dbase is the canonical version of how a software company dies when the next release ships broken.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »