Databases
Blog post mourning decline appears to have helped knock what was left of the veteran app’s online presence offline
It looks like a popular blog post about the decline and fall of dBase
has knocked the long-moribund database’s website offline. Sic
transit gloria mundi?
We were rather entertained by a recent blog post on “Delphi
Nightmares” mourning the passing of the online store for the dBase
website: dBase:
1979-2026. When the post went up, the online shop at
store.dbase.com was still online, but since the post was shared on Hacker
News yesterday, even that has gone. One could say that after 47
years, dBase has finally been debased.
It’s an interesting telling of the decline and fall of what was once
an industry titan, and for us, the disappearance of the site itself once
the blog post went up is just the cherry on top.
Indirectly, what turned into dBase started out as a tool called JPLDIS, written
for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s three Univac 1108 computers. A
FORTRAN rewrite of the simpler Tymshare
RETRIEVE [PDF] tool, it was started by Jack Hatfield and finished by Jeb
Long. C. Wayne Ratliff then rewrote it in Intel 8080 assembly
language for PTSDOS on his IMSAI 8080, and tried to sell it under the
name Vulcan: he put an advert in BYTE Magazine, offering it for $50. It
wasn’t a hit, as he recounted in an interview
with Susan Lammers.
Serial entrepeneur Ed Tate hired him and licensed Vulcan. Tate set up
a new company called Ashton-Tate – there was no Ashton, but he later
bought a parrot, named it Ashton and made it the mascot. Ashton-Tate
renamed the database to dBASE II – to sound more mature – raised the
price dramatically, and sold the CP/M version as shrink-wrap software.The
late John Walker noted in 1982 that it was “selling
like hotcakes at $800 a pop.”
That same year, a PC version of dBase II became one of early commercial
business applications for IBM’s new PC. Former dBase
Developer’s Bulletin editor Jean-Pierre Martel’s personal history of dBASE
recounts how it remained one of the industry-standard apps throughout
the 1980s. In 1984, the enhanced dBase III did even better, followed in
1986 by dBase III+, with a menu-driven UI as well as the infamous “dot
prompt” command line. In 1988, dBase IV followed, but didn’t include the
promised compiler for the dBase programming language.
This opened up opportunities for rivals. Nantucket’s Clipper
was one, which could compile dBase code into applications. It was
already out there: because it didn’t include the interactive language,
that meant it didn’t have the same primary UI, which protected it from
being sued. Clipper ended up acquired by Computer Associates. Fox
Software’s FoxBase, later FoxPro, was another, and even Ratliff
himself was impressed. Microsoft eventually acquired FoxPro.
There were many others, and that was the real program for Ashton-Tate
and the dBase product: its programming language became standardized, and
because of trademark issues, known as xBase.
Even before the era of “open source,” there was a DOS shareware app
called WAMPUM, which is still out there.
There are a number of FOSS implementations, including Harbour and its fork xHarbour. The Harbour GitHub repo has seen some
activity this year, and the xHarbour one some
too.
Once your expensive proprietary app’s file format and programming
language escape into the wild and become partially standardized, that
can make it hard to keep making money from it. It looks like that
finally spelled the end for dBase LLC… but in the meantime, the xBase language is alive and reasonably
well considering its advanced age for a bit of software. ®
