dBase debased: Database titan fades to black after 47 years

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. ®