from
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (8 July 2008)
dBASE
<tool, product, language> An interactive {DBMS}, originally
from {Ashton-Tate Corporation}, and the language used by it.
dBASE evolved from {Vulcan} by Wayne Ratliffe, which came out
in around 1980 and ran on CP/M. It was called dBaseII when
sold to {Ashton-Tate Corporation}.
The first release was dBASE II, ca 1980. There never was a
"dBASE I". Later versions included: {dBASE III}, dBASE III+,
and dBASE IV.
Ashton-Tate was taken over in the early 1990s by what became
{Borland Software Corporation} who sold dBase in March(?)
1999 to the newly formed dBase Inc. dBase Inc's first release
was {Visual dBASE} 5.7, a Y2K upgrade to Visual dBASE 5.x.
Current version, as of 2003-11-24: dBASE PLUS 2.0x build 1703.
dBase Home (http://dbase.com/).
(2003-11-24)