DBase

A CP/M database system introduced in 1980 as dBase II and was quickly ported to most common 8 bit platforms, was ported to DOS in 1982 and later to OS/2 and MS Windows and became an industry standard in the early to mid 80's and the basis of the xBase language, but declined rapidly in the late 80's and early 90's when developer Ashton-Tate could not keep up with the competition.

Text & programmers editors with dBase support

• Boxer - dBase support included by default - Commercial - OS/2 and DOS versions discontinued, Win32 versions still available.

Versions

DOS

• 1982 - dBase II
• 1983 - dBase II Runtime
• 1984 - dBase III - Rewritten in C, much improved functionality but much slower than the assembly coded dBase II.
• 1986 - dBase III+ - Menu system a la Condor Database
• 1994 - dBase V
• 2013 - dBase Classic - Re-release of dBase V

DOS and OS/2 versions

• 1988 - dBase IV
• 1990 - dBase IV v1.1

Windows

• 2013 - dBase Plus 8, 8.1
• 2014 - dBase Plus 9.1, 9.2, 9.5
• 2015 - dBase Plus 10, 10.1, 10.2

Issues

dBase IV has a known index corruption problem, this was fixed in version V but it appears that there is no patch available for IV to fix this.

Links

• dBase LLC - Current owners of the dBase codebase.

License and availability

• Commercial - OS/2 version discontinued - DOS version still sold and supported under the name dBase Classic - MS Windows version still developed.

Author

• C. Wayne Ratliff (Original Author)
• Ashton-Tate
• Borland
• KSoft
• dBase LLC