The whole xBase universe is quite fascinating. It might not have been as revolutionary as spreadsheets, but having databases on your homecomputer/PC covers a lot of use cases for regular people and small businesses. Heck, a lot of what we make way too much money with is basically "just" polishing that. (Or trying to sell you pills while you use that, but let's not digress)

And dBase and its variants/rivals had that pretty much covered, from CP/M to Ataris to DOS and later Windows. Also begat a wide spectrum of programming it, from simple end-user customization to pretty large multi-person applications.

But now? The whole xBase/Clipper-verse almost seems like a unique dead end, in an industry that keeps pretty much every other technology afloat. And it doesn't even seem that that is purely for technical reasons. Sure, client/server and more powerful machiens meant that "proper" RDBMS were getting common, and with environments like Visual Basic or Delphi you could create some pretty neat frontends.

But that was only part of it. Bad acquisitions were another one, with Borland buying dBase and Microsoft buying FoxBase. Not before the dBase makers were a bit too litigious, which doesn't really help trust in the market and individual products.

Right now, the most prominent products still somewhat in line with that would be Access and FileMaker, and they seem slightly different beasts. Or maybe even cloud-based data buckets like Firebase, but they don't quite seem as "egalitarian". And while NoSQL database might claim some relationship, their usage patterns are quite different.