In the mid-late 1960's, Fred Thompson at the [[Jet Propulsion Laboratory]] (JPL) of the [[California Institute of Technology]] (CalTech) was using a Tymeshare product named RETRIEVE.Forto reasonsmanage losta todatabase history,of inelectronic thecalculators. lateIn 60’s1971 JebFred Longcollaborated with Jack Hatfield, a programmer at JPL, wasassignedto thewrite taskan enhanced version of writingRETRIEVE which became the JPLDIS project. JPLDIS evolved into a file management program whichwritten wouldin support[[Fortran|FORTRAN]], notrunning onlyon a [[UNIVAC 1108]] mainframe. Jack Hatfield published two papers entitled "Jet Propulsion Laboratory Data Information System (JPLDIS)". The first paper was presented to the sameUnivac fourUsers basicGroup functionsin asDallas, RETRIEVETX (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, butMissouri (July 1973). Jack 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.
By 1973 the program had evolved into a file management program called JPLDIS (Jet Propulsion Laboratory Database-management and Information-retrival System) written in [[Fortran|FORTRAN]], running on a [[UNIVAC 1108]] mainframe.
In 1978, while at JPL, [[Wayne Ratliff]] wrote a database program in assembly language for [[CP/M]] 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.
