BYTE.com > Chaos Manor > 2003
Tools and Tips
By Jerry Pournelle
January 13, 2003
(Tools and Tips
: Page 1 of 1 )
Column 269 (Continued from the Previous Week)
Alpha Five
In the beginning there was Vulcan, a database creation program written in CP/M S-100 bus days
by
Wayne Ratliff at CalTech. I wrote the first published review of Vulcan, and George Tate read it,
thought about it, and bought Vulcan which he then published as dBase 2 under the publishing name
of Ashton-Tate. There wasn't any Ashton, and there had never been a dBase 1. The marketing
gimmicks must have worked because dBase 2 caught on like wildfire.
dBase 2 was a program developer program: That is, you used it to create standalone data bases.
These could be quite elaborate, with relational connections, complicated reports with automatic
generation and distribution, contact management records, decision triggers, list purges, and of
course ways to enter and delete records. Once the program was compiled and released it would run
on any machine by means of a freely distributable runtime package; you didn't need the dBase 2
program unless you wanted to modify the program by adding fields or new input structures or
decision triggers.
The dBase 2 programming language was quite powerful. It was similar to the Microsoft BASIC of
that time, with most of BASIC's mathematical functions and programming structures. It had sub
routines and if-then-else and case statements, decision loops, and such like; and at one time in
the 80s it was estimated that there were more programmers employed writing in the dBase 2
language than in any other programming language, possibly as many as wrote in the next two most
popular languages combined.
dBase 2 programs compiled to p-code: That is, there needed to be a runtime program on machines
running data base programs created by dBase 2, but there was a third party program called Clipper
that would take a dbase 2 program and compile it to a .exe stand-alone program that didn't even
need a runtime package.
When Microsoft surveyed the database market back in the 1980s it looked to be large, and they
set out to capture it.
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