In the mid-1960's, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) was using an IBM product named RETRIEVE. For reasons lost to history, in the late 60’s Jeb Long, a new programmer at JPL, was assigned the task of writing a program which would perform the same functions as RETRIEVE. By 1973 the program had evolved into a file management program called JPLDIS (Jet Propulsion Laboratory Display Information System) written in FORTRAN, running on a UNIVAC 1108 mainframe. The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in La Cañada Flintridge, near Los Angeles, California, USA, builds and operates unmanned spacecraft for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). ... The California Institute of Technology (commonly referred to as Caltech) is a private, coeducational university located in Pasadena, California, in the United States. ... Fortran (also FORTRAN) is a general-purpose[1], procedural[2], imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. ... The UNIVAC 1108 was the second member of Sperry Rands UNIVAC 1100 series of computers, introduced in 1964. ...

JPLDIS is important because it was the inspiration and precursor to dBASE, arguably one of the most influential DBMS programs for early microcomputers. dBASE III The correct title of this article is dBASE. The initial letter is capitalized because of technical restrictions. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...

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. Please wikify (format) this article as suggested in the Guide to layout and the Manual of Style. ... CP/M is an operating system originally created for Intel 8080/85 and Zilog Z80 based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. ...

In late 1980, George Tate, of Ashton-Tate, entered into a marketing agreement with Wayne Ratliff. Vulcan was renamed to dBase, and the price was raised from $50 to $695, and the software quickly became a huge success. Ashton-Tate (Ashton-Tate Corporation) was a US based software company best known for developing the popular dBASE database application. ...