Ashton-Tate
Sign in to saveAlso known as Ashton-Tate Corporation
Ashton-Tate Corporation was a US-based software company best known for developing the popular dBASE database application and later acquiring Framework from the Forefront Corporation and MultiMate from Multimate International. It grew from a small garage-based company to become a multinational corporation. Once one of the "Big Three" software companies, which included Microsoft and Lotus, the company stumbled in the late 1980s and was sold to Borland in September 1991.
Key facts
- Company.name
- Ashton-Tate Corporation
- Company.logo
- Ashton-Tate logo.svg
- Company.fate
- Acquired
- Company.successor
- Borland
- Company.founder
- George Tate, Hal Lashlee
- Company.location_city
- Torrance, California
- Company.location_country
- US
- Company.industry
- Software
- Company.products
- dBASE, Framework, MultiMate, InterBase, RapidFile, and more
- Company.num_employees
- 1,750
via Wikipedia infobox
~18 min read
Encyclopedic overview
16 sectionsContents
- History
- Early history: dBASE II (1981–1983)
- IBM PC
- Ashton-Tate: IPO and dBASE III (1983–1985)
- Ed Esber
- dBASE III+ and third party clones (1986–1987)
- dBASE IV: Decline and fall (1988–1990)
- Sale to Borland (1991)
- Javelin
- Framework
- MultiMate
- Tate Publishing
- Lawsuits
- Products
- References
- Further reading
Ashton-Tate Corporation was a US-based software company best known for developing the popular dBASE database application and later acquiring Framework from the Forefront Corporation and MultiMate from Multimate International. It grew from a small garage-based company to become a multinational corporation. Once one of the "Big Three" software companies, which included Microsoft and Lotus, the company stumbled in the late 1980s and was sold to Borland in September 1991.
== History == === Early history: dBASE II (1981–1983) === In 1978, Martin Marietta programmer Wayne Ratliff wrote Vulcan, a database application, to help him make picks for football pools. Written in Intel 8080 assembly language, it ran on the CP/M operating system and was modeled on JPLDIS, a Univac 1108 program used at JPL and written by fellow programmer Jeb Long. Ashton-Tate was launched as a result of George Tate and Hal Lashlee having discovered Vulcan from Ratliff in 1981 and licensing it. (Ashton was Tate's after-the-fact parrot, whose cage was kept in his Culver City office.) The original agreement was written on one page, and called for simple, generous royalty payments to Ratliff.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Ashton-Tate” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.