Wayne Ratliff (born 1946, Trenton, Ohio) wrote the database program dBASE II. 1946 (MCMXLVI) was a common year starting on Tuesday. ... Trenton is a city located in Butler County, Ohio. ... dBASE III The correct title of this article is dBASE. The initial letter is capitalized due to technical restrictions. ...

He was raised in various cities and towns in Ohio and Germany. He now resides in the Los Angeles area. This article is about the largest city in California. ...

From 1969 to 1982, Wayne Ratliff worked for the Martin Marietta Corporation in a progression of engineering and managerial positions. He was a member of the NASA Viking program Flight Team when the Viking spacecraft landed on Mars in 1976, and wrote the data-management system, MFILE, for the Viking lander support software. This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... NASAs Viking program consisted of two unmanned space missions to Mars, Viking 1 and Viking 2. ...

In 1978, he wrote a database program in assembly language at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. He called it Vulcan (after Mr. Spock of Star Trek), and based it on Jeb Long's JPLDIS. This program was written to help him win the football pool at the office. He marketed it by himself from 1979 to 1980, but the headaches of handling all the orders himself proved too much, and he solicited no new sales.

In late 1980, he met George Tate, who found the product worthwhile and entered into a marketing agreement with Ashton-Tate and renamed the Vulcan product dBASE. Wayne had given up trying to sell copies of it for $50 each. George told him that he thought it would sell better at $695, so they made a deal and dBASE II was the result. In mid-1983, Ashton-Tate purchased the dBASE II technology and copyright from Ratliff and he joined Ashton-Tate as vice president of new technology. Ratliff was the project manager for dBASE III, as well as designer and lead programmer. Ashton-Tate (Ashton-Tate Corporation) is a former US based software company best known for developing the popular dBASE database application. ...

The program was renamed dBASE II because they knew that version 1 wouldn't sell. It originally ran on a CP/M computer and then was moved over to the IBM PC.

Note there was never anyone named Ashton, it sounded better. Ashton was a maccaw (parrot) that was the unofficial mascot of Ashton-Tate.

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