Jet Propulsion Laboratory Display Information System: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 15:34, 10 August 2012

Revision as of 21:17, 4 September 2012

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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. 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]], over copyrights. On December 11, 1990, Judge Hatter issued an order invalidating Ashton-Tate's copyrights in its own dBASE products.<ref name="foxpro"/> That ruling was based on a legal doctrine known as "unclean hands". 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.<ref name="foxpro" />

== See also ==