Lashlee was somewhat less involved on a day-to-day basis in Ashton-Tate by this time, although he was always aware of and up to speed on all three of the businesses, and was an active board member and officer of SPI.

Between 1986 and 1991 the product was gradually sold to Ashton-Tate, makers of the famous dBASE who were at the time purchasing various database companies in order to fill out their portfolio.

Ashton-Tate ( Ashton-Tate Corporation ) was a US based software company best known for developing the popular dBASE database application.

The history of Ashton-Tate and dBASE are intertwined and as such, must be discussed in parallel.

1. 2 was one of, if not the most stable dBASE versions that Ashton-Tate ever released.

As Ashton-Tate announced newer versions of dBASE, they would often decide to include some of the functionality provided by the third-parties as features of the base system.

Fortunately for Ashton-Tate, large corporations were standardizing on dBASE.

Ashton-Tate had been promising a new version of the core dBASE product line starting around 1986.

Ashton-Tate announced dBASE IV in February 1988 with an anticipated release set for July of that year.

This situation had occurred with dBASE III for instance, and Ashton-Tate had quickly fixed the problems.

Many believed that Ashton-Tate intended dBASE IV to compete with and eliminate the third-party developers.

However, once it became apparent that Diamond was years away from becoming a product, and with poor reviews and slipping sales of dBASE IV 1. 0, Ashton-Tate returned its focus to fixing dBASE IV.

( Note: Microsoft would later acquire Fox Software after Borland acquired Ashton-Tate and the United States Department of Justice forced Borland to not assert ownership of the dBASE language.

It was when Borland showed the product to the Ashton-Tate team that they finally conceded that they had lost the battle for dBASE.

If the court case was successful, Ashton-Tate could stop FoxPro and use the precedent to stop the other clones as well, allowing dBASE to regain a footing and recover from the dBASE IV incident.

* Ashton-Tate copyright shield for dBASE line stripped by court order – details the court case in which dBASE's history lost them the ability to claim copyright.

Ashton-Tate however did not aggressively market Framework compared to its mainstream dBASE product, and it failed to gain more than a fraction of the market share needed to become a workplace standard.

Lotus 1-2-3 was able to successfully capture most of the spreadsheet market and after a number of setbacks regarding Ashton-Tate's flag product, dBASE, Borland bought Ashton-Tate and later sold Framework to Selections & Functions, Inc, who is still actively maintaining it.

xBase is the generic term for all programming languages that derive from the original dBASE ( Ashton-Tate ) programming language and database formats.

While there was a non-commercial predecessor to the Ashton-Tate product ( Vulcan written by Wayne Ratliff ), most clones are based on Ashton-Tate's 1986 dBASE III + release — scripts written in the dBASE III + dialect are most likely to run on all the clones.

One effect of this action was to cause the clone vendors to avoid using the term " dBASE ": a trademark term held by Ashton-Tate.

Software company Ashton-Tate was ready to release their dBase IV database manipulation program, but pushed the release date back to add support for SQL.

The company was soon in trouble, and Borland purchased Ashton-Tate in 1991, acquiring InterBase as part of the deal.

dBase was originally published by Ashton-Tate for CP / M in 1980, and later on ported to the Apple II and IBM PC under DOS.

By the mid-1980s, Ashton-Tate was one of the " big three " software publishers in the early business software market, the other two being Lotus Development and Wordperfect.

It was then that the language started being referred to as " xBase " to distinguish it from the Ashton-Tate product.

In October 1991, while the case was still under appeal, Borland International acquired Ashton-Tate, and as one of the merger's provisions the U. S. Justice Department required Borland to end the lawsuit against Fox and allow other companies to use the dBase language without the threat of legal action.

In 1988, SQL Server for OS / 2 was co-developed for the PC by Sybase, Microsoft, and Ashton-Tate.

Ashton-Tate was launched as a result of George Tate and Hal Lashlee having found and licensed a database program called Vulcan from its author, Wayne Ratliff, in 1981.

Pawluk created the name for the new publishing company by combining George's last name with the fictional person's name of Ashton ( purportedly because it was felt that " Ashton-Tate " sounded better, or was easier to pronounce, than " Lashlee-Tate ").

" It did not trade under its own name, but was a holding company for the three startups: Discount Software, Software Distributors, and Ashton-Tate.

Cole was given free rein to run the businesses, while George Tate primarily remained involved in Ashton-Tate.

Since the company was truly boot-strapped ( i. e. no external venture capital ), the founders did not make a practice of hiring experienced veterans, and most of the team at Ashton-Tate were young and enthusiastic but inexperienced.

When Turner brought Imberg to the Culver City, California corporate headquarters of Ashton-Tate to be trained, the offices were so crowded that the only space available for Imberg was a small desk beside a large photocopier, with no phone line ; the offices were so crowded that when Turner needed to conduct a confidential meeting, he would have it standing up in the nearby restroom.

It is also when Ashton-Tate became one of the " Big Three " personal computer software companies who had weathered the early 1980s " shakeout ", and was considered an equal of Microsoft and Lotus.

At the time of its release, there was a general consensus within Ashton-Tate that a bug-fix version would be released within six months of the 1. 0 release.

In 1988 Ashton-Tate filed suit against Fox Software and Santa Cruz Operation ( SCO ) for copying dBase's " structure and sequence " in FoxBase + ( SCO marketed XENIX and UNIX versions of the Fox products ).

Once Borland acquired Ashton-Tate in mid 1991 ( and was apparently required to drop the lawsuits as an anti-trust related condition of the merger ), such standardization efforts were given new life.

Eventually they decided to look for another partner, and shortly thereafter Wigginton met with several employees of Ashton-Tate and presented a demo of their existing prototype program.

At the time, an Ashton-Tate press release called the acquisition " the largest ever in the microcomputer software industry ".

Seven major software developers — including Ashton-Tate, Hewlett-Packard and Sybase — formed a council in 1990, and issued a report condemning the " vacuous product announcement dubbed vaporware and other misrepresentations of product availability " because they felt it had hurt the industry's credibility.

* Ashton-Tate, software company

When Apple was introducing the Macintosh in the early 1980s, Ashton-Tate was one of the " big three " software companies who Apple was desperate to have support their new platform.

The Tate Publishing division of Ashton-Tate initially published books about Ashton-Tate's software ; in October 1988 it branched out to third-party software.