The Jet Propulsion Laboratory Display Information System (or JPLDIS) is a file management program written in FORTRAN. JPLDIS is important because it was the inspiration and precursor to

dBASE dBase (also stylized dBASE) was one of the first database management systems for microcomputers and the most successful in its day. The dBase system includes the core database engine, a query system, a forms engine, and a programming language ...

, arguably one of the most influential

DBMS In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases spa ...

programs for early microcomputers.

History

In the late 1960s, Fred Thompson at the

Jet Propulsion Laboratory The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is a federally funded research and development center and NASA field center in the City of La Cañada Flintridge, California, United States. Founded in the 1930s by Caltech researchers, JPL is owned by NASA an ...

(JPL) of the

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

(Caltech) was using a

Tymshare Tymshare, Inc (Matthew Heyer-Baker) was a time-sharing service and third-party hardware maintenance company competing with companies such as CompuServe, Service Bureau Corporation and National CSS. Tymshare developed or acquired various technolog ...

product named RETRIEVE to manage a database of electronic calculators. In 1971 Fred collaborated with Jack Hatfield, a programmer at JPL, to write an enhanced version of RETRIEVE which became the JPLDIS project. JPLDIS evolved into a file management program written in FORTRAN, running on a

UNIVAC 1108 The UNIVAC 1100/2200 series is a series of compatible 36-bit computer systems, beginning with the UNIVAC 1107 in 1962, initially made by Sperry Rand. The series continues to be supported today by Unisys Corporation as the ClearPath Dorado Series. ...

mainframe. Hatfield published two papers entitled "Jet Propulsion Laboratory Data Information System (JPLDIS)". The first paper was presented to the Univac Users Group in Dallas, TX (Feb. 1973) and the second paper was presented to the National Science Foundation conference on Data Storage and Retrieval Methods at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri (July 1973). Hatfield left JPL in 1974 and the JPLDIS project was assigned to Jeb Long, another programmer at JPL, who added many advanced features plus a programming language. In 1978, while at JPL,

Wayne Ratliff Cecil Wayne Ratliff (born 1946) wrote the database program Vulcan. Raised in Germany and the US, he now resides in the Los Angeles area. Biography Ratliff was born in 1946 in Trenton, Ohio, USA. From 1969 to 1982 he worked for the Martin Mariett ...

wrote a database program in assembly language for

CP/M CP/M, originally standing for Control Program/Monitor and later Control Program for Microcomputers, is a mass-market operating system created in 1974 for Intel 8080/ 85-based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. Initial ...

based microcomputers to help him win the football pool at the office. He based it on Jeb Long's JPLDIS and called it Vulcan, after Mr. Spock of Star Trek. In late 1980, George Tate, of Ashton-Tate, entered into a marketing agreement with Wayne Ratliff. Vulcan was renamed to dBase, the price was raised from $50 to $695, and the software quickly became a huge success. When a number of "clones" of dBase appeared in the 1990s, Ashton-Tate sued one of them,

FoxPro FoxPro was a text-based procedurally oriented programming language and database management system (DBMS), and it was also an object-oriented programming language, originally published by Fox Software and later by Microsoft, for MS-DOS, Windows ...

, over copyrights. On December 11, 1990, Judge Hatter issued an order invalidating Ashton-Tate's copyrights in its own dBASE products. That ruling was based on a legal doctrine known as "

unclean hands Clean hands, sometimes called the clean hands doctrine, unclean hands doctrine, or dirty hands doctrine, is an equitable defense in which the defendant argues that the plaintiff is not entitled to obtain an equitable remedy because the plaintif ...

". Judge Hatter explained that Ashton-Tate knew that the dBase program development was based on JPLDIS, and that fact was kept hidden from the Copyright Office.

References

{{Reflist, refs= {{cite web, title=The History of Fox Pro, work=Fox Pro, access-date=December 21, 2010, url=http://www.foxprohistory.org/ashton_sues_fox.htm The History of FoxPro - Ashton-Tate vs Fox Software {{cite journal, last=Hawkins, first=John L., date=March 1991, title=dSTORY; how I really developed dBASE. (author of dBASE tells of the database management system's history), journal=Data Based Advisor, volume=9, issue=3, page=93, publisher=Advisor Publications, Inc., issn=1090-6436, url=http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-9229460_ITM, access-date=21 December 2010 {{cite journal, last=Moser, first=Karen D., last2=Ould, first2=Andrew, date=17 December 1990, title=Court ruling turns table on A-T in dBASE battle. (Ashton-Tate's law suit against Fox Software Inc.), journal=PC Week, volume=7, issue=50, page=1, publisher=Ziff Davis Enterprise, location=New York, New York, issn=0740-1604, url=http://find.galegroup.com/gtx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC-Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T003&prodId=AONE&docId=A9685703&source=gale&srcprod=AONE, access-date=21 December 2010 Computer-related introductions in 1973 NASA online Proprietary database management systems

History

See also

References