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The Rise and Fall of Ashton-Tate (2023)

by jasim on 12/12/24, 6:32 PM with 76 comments

• by kstrauser on 12/12/24, 10:00 PM

  Probably my closest claim to fame was when I wrote a little utility, "pgdbf", that reads binary xBase files and writes out .sql files you can pipe into the psql command to turn them into PostgreSQL tables. I wrote it because my work needed it. Long story. Anyway, I asked my boss if I could release it under the GPLv3 and he agreed to it.

  I was utterly gobsmacked to find that it became pretty popular in South America, where Visual FoxPro was wildly popular in some fields. VFP users were left with gigabytes of data in xBase and weren't sure how to easily get it into a "big" database. Someone found my little project and it spread like wildfire, to the point that I got invited to a few conferences to speak about it. I wasn't able to go at the time because of life reasons, but one of my minor regrets was not going to Brazil to talk to a roomful of people who somehow, some way, all decided that I'd written a roadmap to get them out of a pickle.

  Thanks, Ashton-Tate. I have some fun stories to tell due to your inventions.

• by ghshephard on 12/13/24, 2:33 AM

  I vividly recall in the late 80s, sinking a huge chunk of my total net worth at the time (just out of high school) into dBASE IV. I had made tons of money doing small consulting jobs on dBase III+ - knew it inside and out, and was looking forward to the new platform - good lord, it had SQL.

  I still recall the night I picked up the massive package, unpacked the 5 1/4" floppies, started it on my 286 (I don't even think I had a HD in 1988) and ... It didn't work. The most basic straightforward functions in then manual failed to perform the way they were documented. I was certain that it had to be my computer, because there was no possible way that Ashton Tate could ship a product, beautifully packaged, and documented that was just ... broken? And Slow.

  I'd forgotten how tragic that loss was (it was a lot of money for me ).

  I have to believe that whatever processes or behavior that led up to that was the trigger for the downfall of Ashton Tate.

• by yardshop on 12/12/24, 9:06 PM

  My first few programming jobs were in dBASE, the last of which saw the use of dBASE go on for 15 years or so. It was a weird language but still capable of quite a lot. I learned some assembly language with the help of Peter Norton and had a few neat little addons for my dBASE code.

  I tried to transition my company to Borland dBASE 5 when it came out but there was too much to try to upgrade all at once. I was really excited about a lot of the language improvements, and the fact that it was now coming from a real language company, but it was too much too late. A few years later my company moved to different software altogether and dBASE was just a (mostly) fond memory.

  My most productive use of it was with the Topaz library for Turbo Pascal from Software Science. They provided a much more powerful UI capability than one could get from "@ 1,1 say ..." with drop down lists and moveable windows etc. It was still all character mode DOS stuff, but we had the whole menagerie running in Windows for Workgroups for a good while. Those were fun days.

• by gonzus on 12/12/24, 8:04 PM

  Long live Clipper -- one of my first paid gigs. Amazing platform to write (compiled!) console-based applications with a DB living locally or on a networked drive. Something which does not exist anymore as a market.

• by ddgflorida on 12/12/24, 6:54 PM

  I remember those times well, particularly all the clones - i.e. Foxpro. Dbase was a great idea but I sure hated the language used. Paradox and Access were clearly superior.

• by pumplekin on 12/12/24, 8:05 PM

  My memories of Ashton-Tate are weirdly the non-dbase products, mostly the ones the acquired.

  I specifically remember Multimate, the Word Processor, and Framework, the "office suite" I guess.

  But dbase was 90%+ of what Ashton-Tate did so the success of that made of broke the company.

• by BillSaysThis on 12/13/24, 6:40 PM

  I joined the purchasing department at Prentice-Hall in 1988 and saw How to Use and Understand dBase III+, which we'd just published, on my boss's secretary's desk my first day. She so regretted letting me take that because my job was supposed to be Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets but I turned everything into Clipper apps after the first month. Clipper really made my career by turning me into a full-time developer (and not the contract analyst I was supposed to be...).

• by coldcode on 12/12/24, 9:42 PM

  I remember going to the Apple Developer's Conference in 1986 (Nob Hill Hilton I think) and seeing the A-T gang (they brought more people than anyone else) wearing matching leather jackets.

• by worik on 12/12/24, 10:08 PM

  Nearly 20 years old, but a catchup for Wayne Ratliff

  https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2007/08/01/life-af...

• by pvg on 12/12/24, 6:35 PM

  A related discussion from 2013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6426540

• by achairapart on 12/12/24, 9:44 PM

  Found this old Wayne Ratliff' interview in a 1984 PC-MAG issue[0].

      PC: What is this “big picture”? 
  
      RATLIFF: I have to be a little careful about what I answer. It's probably safe to say Artificial Intelligence.
  
      PC: How would you define Artificial Intelligence?
  
      RATLIFF: One way to define Artificial Intelligence is "making computers easier to use." However, we don't Just want to make them five percent easier to use, want to make them dramatically easier to use. We are looking for a breakthrough. Eventually, what we want Artificial Intelligence to do is to take over mechanical duties, to free people for non-mechanical things. I want to see computers in my lifetime — preferably in my hand — performing chores in a human, nonrigid, easy-to-use way. I'd like to be able to tell the computer, "Go and total all the checks I wrote in the last 10 years for medical expenses." That's a nonrigid request.
  
      PC: Do you foresee that dBASE II will be a nucleus for an artificially intelligent system?
  

  ...

  [0]: https://archive.org/details/PC-Mag-1984-02-07/page/n135/mode...

• by davidw on 12/12/24, 7:44 PM

  I seem to recall they get a mention in this book: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4302-0813-6

  It's a fun read, although it goes a bit off the rails at the end, crapping on Linux and open source.

• by netcoyote on 12/13/24, 12:42 AM

  I managed to land my first programming job in DBase for the UCLA admissions office while still a student. On the first day the departing “engineer” (a graduating senior) showed me the application.

  It was essential for the department to function, but had grown into an abomination as many students worked on it.

  In particular, the app barely fit in memory so this enterprising student had updated all the code so each command was shortened from the full name to the first four letters, which DBase would accept as valid. Then removed all the comments and extra white space!

  This kluge apparently afforded enough extra memory that the app could run!

  I noped out of there, and referred my friend for the job. (Sorry Jeff!)

  DBase was really useful in some situations, but like all programming tools it could be badly misused!

• by kcartlidge on 12/13/24, 3:17 PM

  I loved DBase II and DBase III+ but then I switched to DataEase and did some huge database systems mostly running on Netware. Whilst I used Clipper, FoxPro, and others, for that genre of non-client-server text mode databases DataEase v4 was the ultimate (for my tastes). It didn't do well in the Windows transition and doesn't get much of a mention these days, although dataease.com is still developing and releasing stuff (the old DOS editions were the pinnacle and stuff since then is forgettable).

• by wduquette on 12/13/24, 2:06 AM

  I used both dBase II and dBase III a lot back in the day, though not for anything that turned out to be all that useful. There was a lot in the package: a programming language, UI tools, and the data base proper. I’ve always been surprised that no one has written a comparable end-user product based on SQLite and some simple programming language.

• by tomcam on 12/13/24, 4:02 AM

  I sometimes went to Cal State Fullerton to use their computers because I didn’t have one. I met a psychology postgrad using dBase II to build an AI app because that was the only language available to him.

• by Max-q on 12/12/24, 7:06 PM

  MS Access was a very solid product when it came out. dBase had no chance.

• by litoE on 12/13/24, 12:15 AM

  I remember meeting Ashton, of Ashton-Tate. He (or she) was Mr. Tate's large parrot that lived in a huge cage in the lobby of Ashton-Tate's offices in Torrance, California.

• by ngcc_hk on 12/13/24, 2:55 PM

  It is my first job and also my first attempt to read 3/4/5 nominization. Good memory. But all good things come to an end.

• by insane_dreamer on 12/13/24, 2:06 AM

  My first serious programming work was with dBaseII on CP/M. Years later used Clipper, FoxPro, before it all went visual. Good times.