Ashton-Tate

Ashton-Tate (Ashton-Tate Corporation) was a US based software company best known for developing the popular dBASE database application. Ashton-Tate 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 and was later sold to Borland in September 1991. The history of Ashton-Tate and dBASE are intertwined and as such, must be discussed in parallel. Ashton-Tate was launched as a result of George Tate and Hal Lashlee having found and licensed a database program called Vulcan from its author, Wayne Ratliff, in 1981. The original agreement was written on one page, and called for simple, generous royalty payments to...