Interview with Wayne Ratliff, author of dBASE (1986)

This is wonderful to read, and brings back so many memories. I made my living off of dBASEIII+ for several years, starting around the time of this article. I was just thinking about it this past week so it's a great coincidence to see this come up.

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I wrote some very involved data entry screens and report generating software with it. My company's billing and payroll ran off of it for many years. I had inherited the initial versions of it, produced by a third party consultant at great expense, too much so to have them continue to maintain it. I eventually would rewrite nearly all of it, and attempted rewriting it in dBASE 5 several times but it was too much work for one person. I was the only "computer guy" in the company at the time. So we continued with the db3 version for several years, eventually adding parts in Topaz for Turbo Pascal, output to PCL for fancy laser printed payroll sheets (to be sent to the main office to be reentered by hand because they didn't trust data transfer yet!), and many other crutches.

You could write extensions in Assembler to provide whatever unique capabilities you might want, such as coloring or scrolling a block of characters on the screen, or hiding and showing the text cursor. And I remember the feeling of amazement the first time I was able to run a command window and a separate dBase window in Windows 3.11, as well as The Semware Editor and LIST, all at the same time! I no longer had to exit dBase and get back into the editor and vice versa!

I still have a working copy of it on an external drive. Time to go give it a spin!

It's amazing to me how different things are now in the particulars (e.g., computers are probably a million times faster, and you can get a much better and more featured database like Postgres/SQLite for free rather than pay hundreds of dollars for a commercial one) and yet how similar they are in a general sense. You still have people like Wayne out there creating software, motivated by the same kinds of reasons and with the same tastes and proclivities. You still have the same conflict between productive technologists torn between technical work and management as their company scales. And the startup grind he describes is obviously still relevant.

It's a good thing that he stuck with the database rather than quickly turning his attention to natural language processing, since that is only starting to advance in meaningful ways in the last decade now that we have the required data and compute resources-- he would have been very frustrated!

> I took the JPLDIS concept, cut back on the specs, and wrote Vulcan. JPLDIS would handle two hundred fields, but I thought sixteen was plenty. I got it working and a little over a year after I started, I did my taxes on it. So, I figured Vulcan had some commercial potential, and I began to polish it up and get it to a sellable stage. In October 1979, I went to market and put my first ad for Vulcan in BYTE magazine, and I ran a quarter-page ad for four or five months thereafter. I got much more response than I could handle.

Here's the ad:

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1979-10-rescan/pag...

Only $490, or the equivalent of $1860 today.

Lots of other great old ads and articles in these BYTE Magazines! archive.org has a bunch of them.

I started out with dBASE III+ but never really got it. Borland had a far superior product in Paradox (which they bought from Ansa). Paradox 3.5 helped me understand the power of relational databases -- the Paradox Application Language (PAL) was an amazing language and so was Query-By-Example (QBE).

But Borland also decided to buy Ashton-Tate so for a while they owned both dBASE and Paradox. dBASE became the red-headed stepchild in the Borland world, but still consumed Borland resources to develop and maintain. It was a weird time in the industry.

This brings back memories, I was introduced to xBase via dBASE III+, then we got to learn Clipper Summer '87, and I jumped into Clipper 5 for some projects freelancing outside school (Hurray OOP support!).

So it was basically Turbo Pascal / Assembly for general purpose programming and Clipper for anything DB related.

Still remember how hard it was to initially understand RDMS, given how much I happened to use xBase, thus I was kind of attached to its DB model.

For those curious about dBASE, this video from 1984 gives a good (and amusing) overview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0ng2Tp01Hc

dBase II, III+ and (ugh) IV developer here... Nice to see some of these earlier interviews with the likes of C. Wayne Ratliff and Anders Heljsberg etc. I remember one of my favourite interviews back in the day was reading a Wayne Ratliff one in what I think was 'Byte' magazine.

This offhand comment took me back:

"Now you can buy an AT, with a hard disk, complete and ready to roll for $6,000."

I couldn't afford an AT when I got my first computer; I spent $1,200 on a Leading Edge Model D, an 8088 with 512K of RAM, no hard drive, and two 360K floppies. Then I had to figure out how to have it set up a RAM disk on every boot for commonly used programs since loading them from the floppy drive was so slow. But even a 10 MB hard drive was beyond my means at the time.

> I went out and bought lots of books on natural language and artificial intelligence. I kept getting drawn from one place to another, and I did lots of experiments.

It's amazing how some things in computer programming never change.

What I remember the most with dBase is the immediate feedback loop you got: start the exe and you were set to work. I miss quite often this feeling, especially when trying to explore ideas. The second thing I miss is the integration you got: it was so easy to switch from ´developing’ to using the stuff you wrote.

So now I can do so much more, but even for simple problem the setup is laughably complex. I wish we could have both.

> Ted Glasser, who has a number of patents and is a very senior person in the computing industry, and is in Who's Who, once told people that the biggest team he could manage was one that could drive out to get pizza in a Volkswagen. Since then he's changed his tune--it's now a regular-size American car. I wholeheartedly agree with that.

And that’s how we got to 2 pizza teams I guess.

"After more than fifteen years in the computer industry"

It must be more than that. Maybe 50?

Anybody remember Framework ???. I developed some apps in it , rather interesting for it's time.

1986 computing: solving real-life problems for a reasonable price

2020 computing: extracting sensitive information from and selling digital cornfields to morons

I posit that the latest "value-add" to come out of internet-age computing has been primarily eugenic in nature--thus necessitating sprawling mothership full-service complexes to keep nerds from mixing with their marks, and possibly developing some sympathy/mercy toward them.