Ashton-Tate

Ashton-Tate Corporation

Industry	Software
Fate	Acquired
Successor	Borland
Founded	August 1980
Founder	George Tate, Hal Lashlee
Defunct	October 1991
Headquarters	Torrance, California, US
Products	dBASE, Framework, MultiMate, InterBase, RapidFile, and more
Number of employees	1750

Ashton-Tate (Ashton-Tate Corporation) was a US-based software company best known for developing the popular dBASE database application. Ashton-Tate grew from a small garage-based company to become a multinational corporation. Once one of the "Big Three" software companies, which included Microsoft and Lotus, the company stumbled and was later sold to Borland in September 1991.

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

In 1978 Martin Marietta programmer Wayne Ratliff wrote Vulcan, a database application, to help him make picks for football pools. Written in Intel 8080 assembly language, it ran on the CP/M operating system and was modeled on JPLDIS, a Univac 1108 program used at JPL and written by fellow programmer Jeb Long. Ashton-Tate was launched as a result of George Tate and Hal Lashlee having found and licensed Vulcan from Ratliff in 1981. The original agreement was written on one page, and called for simple, generous royalty payments to Ratliff.

Tate and Lashlee had already built two successful start-up companies by this time—Discount Software (whose president was Ron Dennis), which was one of the first to sell PC software programs through the mail to consumers, and Software Distributors (acting CEO at the time was Linda Johnson), (later renamed SofTeam)—which was one of the first wholesale distributors of PC software in the world.

The founders needed to change the name, because Harris Corporation already had an operating system called Vulcan. Hal Pawluk, who worked for their advertising agency, suggested "dBASE", including the CamelCase. He also suggested that the first release of the product "II" would imply that it was already in its second version, and therefore would be perceived as being more reliable than a first release. The original manual was too complex from Pawluk's perspective, so he wrote a second manual, which was duly included in the package along with the first. Pawluk created the name for the new publishing company by combining George's last name with the fictional Ashton surname, purportedly because it was felt that "Ashton-Tate" sounded better, or was easier to pronounce, than "Lashlee-Tate". In reality, George Tate did not have a pet parrot named Ashton, until after Hal Pawluk named the company. Because people kept calling the company asking to speak to Mr Ashton, this hidden tidbit of information became a PC industry insider joke.