Jet Propulsion Laboratory Display Information System
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The Jet Propulsion Laboratory Display Information System (or JPLDIS) is a file management program written in FORTRAN.
JPLDIS is important because it was the inspiration and precursor to
History
In the late 1960s, Fred Thompson at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) was using a Tymshare product named RETRIEVE to manage a database of electronic calculators. In 1971 Fred collaborated with Jack Hatfield, a programmer at JPL, to write an enhanced version of RETRIEVE which became the JPLDIS project.
JPLDIS evolved into a file management program written in
In 1978, while at JPL, Wayne Ratliff wrote a database program in assembly language for CP/M based microcomputers to help him win the football pool at the office. He based it on Jeb Long's JPLDIS and called it Vulcan, after Mr. Spock of Star Trek. In late 1980, George Tate, of Ashton-Tate, entered into a marketing agreement with Wayne Ratliff. Vulcan was renamed to dBase, the price was raised from $50 to $695, and the software quickly became a huge success.
When a number of "clones" of dBase appeared in the 1990s, Ashton-Tate sued one of them,
See also
- dBase
- Vulcan (programming language)