Cecil Wayne Ratliff (born 1946) wrote the

database 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 s ...

program

Vulcan Vulcan may refer to: Mythology * Vulcan (mythology), the god of fire, volcanoes, metalworking, and the forge in Roman mythology Arts, entertainment and media Film and television * Vulcan (''Star Trek''), name of a fictional race and their home p ...

. Raised in

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...

and the US, he now resides in the

Los Angeles Los Angeles ( ; es, Los Ángeles, link=no , ), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, largest city in the U.S. state, state of California and the List of United States cities by population, sec ...

area.

Biography

Ratliff was born in 1946 in Trenton, Ohio, USA. From 1969 to 1982 he worked for the

Martin Marietta Corporation The Martin Marietta Corporation was an American company founded in 1961 through the merger of Glenn L. Martin Company and American-Marietta Corporation. In 1995, it merged with Lockheed Corporation to form Lockheed Martin. History Martin M ...

in a progression of engineering and managerial positions. He was a member of the

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil List of government space agencies, space program ...

Viking program The ''Viking'' program consisted of a pair of identical American space probes, ''Viking 1'' and ''Viking 2'', which landed on Mars in 1976. Each spacecraft was composed of two main parts: an orbiter designed to photograph the surface of Mars f ...

flight team when the Viking spacecraft landed on

Mars Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun and the second-smallest planet in the Solar System, only being larger than Mercury. In the English language, Mars is named for the Roman god of war. Mars is a terrestrial planet with a thin at ...

in 1976, and wrote the data management system, MFILE, for the Viking lander support

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. ...

. In 1978 Ratliff wrote Vulcan, a

database application A database application is a computer program whose primary purpose is retrieving information from a computerized database. From here, information can be inserted, modified or deleted which is subsequently conveyed back into the database. Early e ...

, to help him make picks for

football pool In the United Kingdom, the football pools, often referred to as "the pools", is a betting pool based on predicting the outcome of association football matches taking place in the coming week. The pools are typically cheap to enter, and may encou ...

s. Written in

Intel 8080 The Intel 8080 (''"eighty-eighty"'') is the second 8-bit microprocessor designed and manufactured by Intel. It first appeared in April 1974 and is an extended and enhanced variant of the earlier 8008 design, although without binary compatibil ...

assembly language, it ran on the CP/M

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also i ...

and was modeled on JPLDIS. After selling Vulcan by himself from 1979 to 1980, he licensed the software, renamed dBASE, to Ashton-Tate. In 1982 Ratliff left JPL and joined Ashton-Tate as vice president of new technology. (He never used the software for its original purpose; in 1984 Ratliff confessed that dBASE had made him so busy that "I've only had time to watch two or three football games".) Ratliff was the project manager for dBASE III, as well as designer and lead programmer. From 1987 to 1988 Ratliff wrote Emerald Bay, a client/server database manager. Currently retired, Ratliff spends time sailing and studying mathematics. He has worked on computer systems for use in competitive sailboat racing.

References

1946 births Living people People from Trenton, Ohio {{Compu-scientist-stub