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dBASE was the first widely used database management system or DBMS for microcomputers, published by Ashton-Tate for CP/M, and later on the Apple II, Apple Macintosh, UNIX , VMS , and IBM PC under DOS where it became one of the best-selling software titles for a number of years. more...

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dBASE was never able to transition successfully to Microsoft Windows and was eventually displaced by newer products like Paradox, Clipper, FoxPro, and Microsoft Access. dBASE was sold to Borland in 1991, which sold the rights to the product line in 1999 to the newly-formed dBASE Inc.

Starting in the mid 1980s many other companies produced their own dialects or variations on the product and language. These included FoxPro (now Visual FoxPro), Arago, Force, Recital, dbFast, dbXL, Quicksilver, Clipper, Xbase++, FlagShip, and Harbour. Together these are informally referred to as xBase or XBase.

dBASE's underlying file format, the .dbf file, is widely used in many other applications needing a simple format to store structured data.

dBASE was licensed to users for a term of fifty years in the unlikely event that a user would use their copy of dBASE for a long period of time.

Origins

The original developer of dBASE was Wayne Ratliff. In 1978, while at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Ratliff wrote a database program in assembly language for CP/M based microcomputers to help him win the football pool at the office. He based it on Jeb Long's JPLDIS (Jet Propulsion Laboratory Display Information System) and called it \"Vulcan,\" after Mr. Spock of Star Trek. According to Ratliff, the language in JPLDIS was a simple, command-driven language intended for interactive use on printing terminals. There is some evidence that JPLDIS was influenced by a legacy mainframe database product called RETRIEVE.

In early 1980, George Tate, of Ashton-Tate, entered into a marketing agreement with Ratliff. Vulcan was renamed to dBASE, and the software quickly became a huge success.

dBASE programming language

After porting Vulcan to the IMSAI 8080 and later to CP/M and MS-DOS (as dBASE), Ratliff added commands to accommodate the video screen interface as well as commands for improved control of flow (such as DO WHILE/ENDDO) and conditional logic (such as IF/ENDIF).

For handling data, dBASE provided detailed procedural commands and functions to open and traverse files (e.g., USE, SKIP, GO TOP, GO BOTTOM, and GO recno), manipulate field values (REPLACE and STORE), and manipulate text strings (e.g., STR() and SUBSTR()), numbers, and dates. Its ability to simultaneously open and manipulate multiple files containing related data lead Ashton-Tate to label dBASE a \"relational database,\" even though it did not meet the criteria defined by Dr. Edgar F. Codd's relational model.

dBASE used a runtime interpreter architecture, which allowed the user to execute commands by typing them in a command line \"dot prompt.\" Upon typing a command or function and pressing the return key, the interpreter would immediately execute or evaluate it. Similarly, program scripts (text files with PRG extensions) ran in the interpreter (with the DO command), where each command and variable was evaluated at runtime. This made dBASE programs quick and easy to write and test because programmers didn't have to first compile and link them before running them. (For other languages, these steps were tedious in the days of single- and double-digit megahertz CPUs.) The interpeter also handled automatically and dynamically all memory management (i.e., no preallocating memory and no hexadecimal notation), which more than any other feature made it possible for a business person with no programming experience to develop applications.

Read more at Wikipedia.org