Jet Propulsion Laboratory Display Information System: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 23:08, 20 March 2006

Revision as of 12:01, 5 May 2006

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In the mid-1960's, the [[Jet Propulsion Laboratory]] (JPL) of the [[California Institute of Technology]] (CalTech) was using an IBM product named RETRIEVE. For reasons lost to history, in the late 60’s Jeb Long, a new programmer at JPL, was assigned the task of writing a program which would perform the same functions as RETRIEVE. By 1973 the program had evolved into a file management program called JPLDIS (Jet Propulsion Laboratory Display Information System) written in [[Fortran|FORTRAN]], running on a [[UNIVAC 1108]] mainframe.

JPLDIS is important because it was the inspiration and precursor to [[dBASE]], arguably one of the most influential [[Database management system|DBMS]] programs for early microcomputers.

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, and the price was raised from $50 to $695, and the software quickly became a huge success.