dBASE

A popular database management system produced by Ashton Tate Corporation. The original version, called Vulcan, was created by Wayne Ratliff. In 1981, Ashton-Tate bought Vulcan and marketed it as dBASE II. Subsequent versions with additional features are known as dBASE III, dBASE III+, and dBASE IV, all of which were owned and developed by Borland Corporation (now Inprise), but were sold to dBASE Inc. in March, 1999.

The current version for Windows 95 and higher is dBASE PLUS, which is available with a twelve-month on-line upgrades, fixes, and updates. The program CD also includes older versions of dBASE: dBASE 5.0 for DOS; and the 16-bit version, Visual dBASE 5.7 for Windows.

The dBASE format for storing data has become a de facto standard, and is supported by nearly all database management and spreadsheet systems. Even systems that do not use the dBASE format internally are able to import and export data in dBASE format.