The Rise and Fall of Ashton-Tate (2023)

https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-ashton-tate

by jasim • 2 years ago

105 76 2 years ago

abortretry.fail

pvg• 2 years ago

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

dang• 2 years ago

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

The Rise and Fall of Ashton-Tate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36257178 - June 2023 (1 comment)

The Rise, Fall and Survival of Ashton-Tate's dBASE - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6426540 - Sept 2013 (25 comments)

ddgflorida• 2 years ago

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.

bombcar2• 2 years ago

We've really kind of "lost" the end-user database. I played with an older version of Access and was blown away by how user-friendly and capable it was compared to just doing things in spreadsheets.

Losing Access and similar things has lead to Salesforce being a billion dollar company; when it's basically AccessOnline™.

082349872349872• 2 years ago

Looks like FileMaker is still around, or do they somehow not count as end-user db?

breadwinner• 2 years ago

There are new alternatives that are basically AccessOnline™, see https://visualdb.com

the_arun• 2 years ago

We've really kind of "lost" the end-user database.

How? Aren't Google & Excel Spreadsheets end user databases?

flyinghamster• 2 years ago

Not only that, but JET (the database engine) also integrated into Visual Basic and C++. I was using MDBs in applications long before SQLite3 became a thing.

zie3• 2 years ago

LibreOffice has one built-in. I don't know anyone that uses it though, which is sad, because it seems to work fine.

It seems we have decided to go the SaaS route instead and you get online only things that sort of play at Access, but "with cloud".

moomin• 2 years ago

Access was powerful and dominated the market for a while but there were two problems: 1) it was kind of bad from a pure dev perspective compared to SQL Server b) non-pure devs made horrible broken apps and eventually ended up calling in the pure devs, who moved them to SQL Server.

pjmlp4• 2 years ago

Access is still around, the problem is that it isn't on the basic Office offering, and not everyone is going to give 180 euros for a single product.

criddell• 2 years ago

My first paid programming jobs were writing Clipper applications for small businesses around the city I lived in. I have very fond memories of the work, the people, and the equipment I worked on (XT clone with a floppy drive then after I made some money, an AT clone with a 20 MB hard drive).

burnte• 2 years ago

I made a good amount of money moving people from dBase to Access.

neverartful3• 2 years ago

FoxPro was a real treat! It was well polished and lightning fast.

Max-q• 2 years ago

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

thinkling• 2 years ago

By the time Access came out, Ashton Tate had already declined and been swallowed up by Borland.

davidw• 2 years ago

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.

gonzus• 2 years ago

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.

neverartful3• 2 years ago

Same here. I really enjoyed working with Clipper. The fun ran out when my application was bursting through the available memory though. It would be nice to have a 64 bit linux/macos/windows Clipper-like compiler.

pasc1878• 2 years ago

Well that exists Harbour https://harbour.github.io

GrumpyNl• 2 years ago

Same here, good memories, compiling took up to 30 minutes, so during compiling we always went for a game of billiards. Coming back you found out that the compilation had crashed after 5 minutes, fix bug and start the same routine.

vasac• 2 years ago

I don’t recall compilation being slow. The Clipper app for small businesses that my father created used overlays because it couldn’t fit in memory, yet compilation was still fast (all of this was happening on an XT). Linking, on the other hand, was painfully slow, but one could use Turbo Linker if overlays weren’t needed—TL was unbelievably fast. Later, Blinker came along. It was slower than TL but offered excellent support for overlays (and a bunch of other useful features) while still being much faster than MS Linker.

pjmlp4• 2 years ago

I used Clipper Summer '87, and Clipper 5.x on a 386SX, running at 20MHz, 2 MB, and a 40 MB HDD.

What were you doing for 30 minutes?!?

fuzztester3• 2 years ago

XBase / Foxpro / Clipper apps are probably still used in India, widely, in small department stores, grocery stores, factories, medical stores, etc.

They are much faster to operate and more efficient for CRUD type apps then GUI based ones.

myth2018• 2 years ago

Same in Brazil. And users love them.

Zardoz84• 2 years ago

Take a look to what are using on Leroy & Merlin stores

achairapart3• 2 years ago

Also, there were a ton of very powerful third-party libraries too!

pumplekin• 2 years ago

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.

jhbadger• 2 years ago

Yes, I remember Multimate -- it had a very weird user interface but that was because it was designed to be similar to the dedicated Wang word processors of the late 1970s/early 1980s. When I was working in a university library in the 1980s the staff all used Multimate because they had recently gotten PCs to replace their Wang word processors and wanted something familiar.

Pamar• 2 years ago

Framework!!!

reaperducer• 2 years ago

I loved Framework. The ultimate DOS shell, and so very very much more.

All the capability of Mac OS, but with the speed and hotkeys of a department store POS system. I don't know if it had a graphic component, because I ran it on an IBM XT with an MDA display.

I tried to find Framework disks online a few years ago so I could relive it under DOSBox, but came up empty.

pkphilip• 2 years ago

Really interesting to see that "Framework" software download is 38MB while the manual is 119MB!

https://winworldpc.com/product/framework/10

yardshop2• 2 years ago

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.

chasil2• 2 years ago

I was actually tasked with pulling a customer list out of dBASE 2 on CP/M that had 8" floppy disks (in addition to the hard drive).

I managed to do it by configuring the serial port as the printer, at 9600/n/8/1.

I used a null modem into my laptop, and captured the output with Procomm.

Fun times.

yardshop2• 2 years ago

Ha, funny! I did something very similar when we moved from old NEC APCs with 8" floppies to brand new IBM PC XTs and ATs! The consultants wanted something like $200 per disk to convert them. I was able to rig up a serial cable and a tiny Turbo Pascal program to send files from one machine to another. A couple cheap cable ends from Radio Shack and some spare phone wire from the basement was all it needed!

The serial printer port trick is very clever too. I don't think my transfer was as fast as 9600. Good job!

coldcode• 2 years ago

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.

achairapart3• 2 years ago

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...

achairapart3• 2 years ago

I don't know how I fell down this rabbit hole tonight, but here is another interview[0], I think circa 1985:

    Susan Lammers: Have you ever explored the field of artificial intelligence?

    Wayne Ratliff: I was really involved in AI at the start of this business. A little over a year ago, I turned to AI, because I thought that was the future. But I've grown away from it.

    AI has a future, but it's not very immediate. First of all, there's the problem of natural language. If you have a natural-language system, you buy it and bring it home and put it on your computer. Then you have to go through a weeks-long, maybe months-long process to teach it what your particular words mean. The same word has different meanings in different contexts. Even what would appear to be a straightforward word, like "profit," can have a variety of meanings. It needs to be very explicitly defined, based on which business you're in and how your books are set up, and that sort of thing. So this long process necessary for training the machine kills AI, as far as it being a turnkey product.

    But the other side, which is very interesting, is expert systems. My prediction is that within the next two or three years, expert systems will no longer be associated with artificial intelligence. That's been the history of AI: when something starts to become fairly well known, it splits off. Pattern recognition used to be considered AI, but now it is a separate field. That's the immediate destiny of expert systems. I think expert systems are going to be very important in our industry, analogous to vertical applications.

[0]: http://www.foxprohistory.org/interview_wayne_ratliff.htm

I think it's from this book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2092682.Programmers_at_W...

kstrauser4• 2 years ago

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.

ASalazarMX• 2 years ago

I can attest xBase (dBase, Clipper, etc.) were BIG in Latin America. It was a combination of running flawlessly in limited hardware, a full-stack development environment (before that was a thing), and ease of installation. It was decades ahead of its time.

Its pinnacle was Fox Pro LAN, at which point Microsoft embraced (bought), extended (Visual Fox Pro), and extinguished it. Microsoft didn't randomly gain a reputation for being evil, it thoroughly earned that.

kstrauser4• 2 years ago

That jibes with my understanding, based purely on anecdotes from users. It seemed like there was an entire, thriving community south of me who Microsoft completely abandoned.

pjmlp4• 2 years ago

To add my voice to sibling comments, up to CA's acquisition of Clipper on the mid-90's, database development in the Iberian Peninsula was all about xBase.

DBase, and all its derivatives were everywhere.

Additionally, before VB and Delphi took over this market, many MS-DOS xBase refugees found a new home in Visual Fox Pro.

worik• 2 years ago

Nearly 20 years old, but a catchup for Wayne Ratliff

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

litoE• 2 years ago

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.

netcoyote• 2 years ago

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!

wduquette• 2 years ago

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.

insane_dreamer• 2 years ago

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

ghshephard• 2 years ago

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.

tomcam• 2 years ago

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.

ngcc_hk• 2 years ago

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.

kcartlidge• 2 years ago

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).

BillSaysThis• 2 years ago

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...).

The Rise and Fall of Ashton-Tate (2023)

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