Jet Propulsion Laboratory Display Information System: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 13:00, 31 July 2017

Revision as of 17:29, 20 April 2018

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In the late 1960s, Fred Thompson at the [[Jet Propulsion Laboratory]] (JPL) of the [[California Institute of Technology]] (Caltech) was using a [[Tymshare]] product named RETRIEVE to manage a database of electronic calculators. In 1971 Fred collaborated with Jack Hatfield, a programmer at JPL, to write an enhanced version of RETRIEVE which became the JPLDIS project.

JPLDIS evolved into a file management program written in [[Fortran|FORTRAN]], running on a [[UNIVAC 1108]] mainframe. Hatfield published two papers entitled "Jet Propulsion Laboratory Data Information System (JPLDIS)". The first paper was presented to the Univac Users Group in Dallas, TX (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, Missouri (July 1973). Hatfield left JPL in 1974 and the JPLDIS project was assigned to Jeb Long, another programmer at JPL. When Jeb Long received it, whoit was a prototype. It was buggy and definitely not ready for prime time. Jeb turned it into a production program. He added many new commands and many advanced features plus a programming language. Jeb Long wrote a user manual and taught hundreds of people at JPL to use it. Official JPL education and support was added under the coordination of Jeb Long. JPLDIS was distributed throughout NASA and was used by many NASA organizations.

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 II, the price was raised from $50 to $695, Jeb Long converted dBASE II from an 8-bit to a 16-bit microprocessor and adapted it to operate on the IBMPC. As a result the software quickly became a huge success. Both Jeb and Wayne joined Ashton-Tate and were involved in the develop of dBASE III, dBASE III+ and dBASE IV.

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" />