The Rise, Fall and Survival of Ashton-Tate's dBASE | Hacker News Reader

The Rise, Fall and Survival of Ashton-Tate's dBASE

eweek.com

62 pointsohjeez25 comments

OK so do you want the real story? The genius behind dBase was Wayne Ratliff. When George Tate died of a heart attack on 1984 at age 39 the company's new CEO was Ed Esber.

While Tate had a productive relationship with Ratliff and realized he was important to the companies success. Ed Esber fought with Ratliff. He famously told dBase's inventor that his contributions to the company were no important to the success of Ashton-Tate than the guy on the loading dock.

Ratliff quit and started Migent to compete against Ashton-Tate. Esber sued the young company over appropriation of trade secrets. You can trace the company's decline from this point. Ratliff introduced an innovative client server database called Emerald Bay but lacked the marketing chops to succeed. SQL was beginning to take off and when Microsoft introduced Access and made it easily accessible to the same customer base that dBase targeted it was the death knell.

My first programming language was dBASE, soon after which I started using Clipper, a superset of dBASE which compiled to p-code based binaries. It had a thriving third party library market, and supported code blocks (anonymous functions) and much more.

Clipper was also abandoned by Computer Associates who bought it from the original Nantucket Corporation. There are however two open-source projects that are still being actively developed: Harbour (http://www.harbour-project.org/) and xHarbour (http://xharbour.org/). Both are being used by enterprises that still has xBase apps around.

I did my first contracting gig getting paid by the hour hacking DBase business programs. On the side I wrote a checkbook program, calendaring app, and RPG character generator.

I have fond memories of DBase, especially DBase III+. I remember when computers had "turbo" buttons and you could make a dog program run like lightning by simply hitting the button. I also remember compiling DBase programs in Clipper, and all sorts of other fun stuff. I worked for one guy that bought faster crystals to make his CPUs run better -- the very first PC overclocking that I ever saw.

Eventually, the home/small business database market went to Microsoft, who released MS Access. All of the "real" programmers said it was a toy and wouldn't deign to use it, but consumers bought it up and started creating their own apps. This was great news for me, because most of the time they created a mess and somebody had to come in and clean it all up. DBase was a big part of how I went from high school kid to independent programmer.

Good times.

"but consumers bought it up"

dBase was very expensive, shooting itself in its own foot.

The danger of a 50000% profit or whatever Ashton-Tate accomplished, is a business culture builds up that requires 49999% profit margins to survive, when prices push down to normal levels via competition, collapse is inevitable.

I recall the shift coinciding with the purchase of FoxBase. At least that's when we started making bets on MSFT's roadmap.

Great historical context here, by the way: http://weblogs.foxite.com/joel_leach/2011/10/13/why-microsof...

I start with foxpro/visual foxpro. I still think was the MOST productive environment, bar none, for complete, end-to-end app development (for desktop).

I still miss it. I work with Delphi and later python (I like so much python) but still feel cheated by how much extra work is necessary.

I'm dreaming in a new language that mix python/foxpro and have sqlite integrate directly, so database and app development were as natural as with fox.

I still consider the Visual FoxPro REPL and debug window THE golden standard! NO even iPython is superior. It was so out-your-way and dam practical (you can use it directly from your own apps!, talking about easy solving on your running apps)

A good history of the start of FoxPro: http://www.hentzenwerke.com/catalog/ftale.htm

I still end up using VFP occasionally to port our older clients to our newer software.

Python/SQLite is almost as productive, you can do some sweet stuff with a few lines of code. Not as REPL, though. Throw in some pandas, IPython and some SQLAlchemy and your are rocking.

You should be excited to see this:

http://www.dabodev.com/

If you've never read it, "In Search of Stupidity" ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001C6MQA8/ref=as_li_ss_til?tag=de... ) covers this and other companies that rose and fell. His thesis is that the most successful companies weren't really all that brilliant and visionary - just less stupid than some of their competition.

Indeed, almost every company rose (at their level) and fell. For the few survivors you can check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies

Ryokan hotels are clearly the business to be in, if you're in it for the long term.

This brings back memories.

My first DB system was dBase III+. Eventually I ended up doing some work in Clipper Summer 87, followed by Clipper 5.x with some OO even!

I remember playing around with CA's Visual Objects "evolution" of Clipper, but never did anything with it.

By then, I was more interested into Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++ for Windows 3.x.

As anecdote, maybe shared by other HN members, I remember having some problems migrating from the dBase mindset of what a DB is, into the SQL model.

Wow, Clipper brings me some memories... I remember APPEND BLANK and REPLACEs, and also having to tell customers to reindex (and regenerate the dreaded .NTX index files) every day before starting operations. Good times!

One nice thing about Clipper is that it had "code blocks" that was the first time I had contact with what we today call Closures. It had a syntax close to Ruby blocks: { |X| ... }

We always made an option into our application settings for index regeneration. :)

Until last year, I was a daily user of dBase IV for DOS at work. Amazingly stable and easy to use, and to this day, Excel can read and write those .dbf files. I really liked it.

The later versions of Excel dropped support for the .dbf format.

That must have been with the recent versions that switched to the ribbon bars. Those versions we never used at my last job.

AFAIK Office 2003 SP3 also disables dBase II support by default.

Read support was dropped for only dBase II. Write support was dropped for all dBase formats.

I remember starting a new job in 1989 and seeing a copy of a dBase III+ book on my boss's secretary's desk. Blew through it in two weeks and was referred to Clipper by a co-worker, still a developer 24 years later (SMF!).

Clipper's constrained class system (de-constrained by a third party library) is still one of my favorite dev environments. Brian Marasca's ObjectDb library was an eye-opener and a great tool--thanks mate!

CA-Visual Objects, wow, talk about a missed opportunity. I co-wrote one of the first (and few, in the end) books about it during the beta phase. As the years went on I came to understand that with Clipper in the CA stable there was little chance of any different outcome but still a huge disappointment.

PC-file FTW. I created a stock tracking app for our electronics R&D department with it. It was one of the original shareware apps. Must have been about 1985.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-File

The article in one page http://www.eweek.com/print/database/30-years-ago-the-rise-fa...

It seems that a dos version is still being sold (http://dbaseclassic.com/) and the company claim for more than 7 million active users.

dBASE was my first "real" programming language (.bat & basic don't count) and we used Clipper. (circa 1993)

Of further note was the mention of FoxBase, which became FoxPro and is what we used to develop one of the first online offender databases for our state sheriff's department. For some reason using FoxPro seemed less like "programming" than using Clipper. (too much like Visual Basic)

Thanks for the walk down memory lane!

dBase III is the program that taught me as a 10-year-old not to just flick the switch on my IBM XT like it was a light when it was no longer needed, but to save and exit gracefully first.

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