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To: Bob Kim who wrote (165206)	5/16/2002 12:24:41 PM
From: The Duke of URL©	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

Now def OT, other than it shows the power of IA64 over proprietary solutions: CORECTOMUNDO!!!! Circa 1980, a programmer for the Jet Propulsion Laborotries, by the name of Wayne Ratlief, imported a mainframe database program into the mini environment and called it Vulcan. Wayne later hooked up with a character, a salesman, named George Tate. (I've never seen any report that George Tate had any programming experience.) dBASE version 2.0 was born. The company was called Aston-Tate. (There never was anyone named Aston, it just sounded good and there never was a version 1 of dBASE.) dBASE was improved to the point that dBASE 3+ became the premire and dominate desktop industry standard. Finally, dBASE 4 version 1.0 was released. But Wayne had left the company by then and dBASE 4 was actually created by a committee. It has the distinction of being probably one of the most buggy mainstream programs ever, including the early Windows programs. But George Tate decided that the MacIntosh was obviously the wave of the future, and the resources of Aston-Tate were directed towards porting dBASE into the Mac environment. (Question, why didn't the Mac become the 800 pound gorilla?) It took almost a year and a half before a bug-fix program, dBASE IV version 1.5 was released and eventually dBASE IV version 2.0. Version 2.0 was really pretty good. Fast, stable and useable. However, in this same timeframe, a University professor (Indiana, as I remember) and his grad students, had created another program, that eventually became Foxpro. Most database application designers will tell you that Foxpro was better than dBASE (at that time). But dBASE had the corporate market tied up. dBASE was the defacto standard. (dBASE, Lotus 1-2-3 and Wordperfect were the Big 3). But because dBASE had released such a rotten program AND they had suspended fixing the release for such an extended period of time, they gave the new an innovative Foxpro a chance to gain a foothold on the ever expanding market. Bad decisions, bad timing, bad news. Aston-Tate never recovered from a series of bad decisions, and was eventually bought out by Borland.