Information about Jpldis
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 dBASE, arguably one of the most influential DBMS programs for early microcomputers.
By 1973 the program had evolved into a file management program called JPLDIS (Jet Propulsion Laboratory Database-management and Information-retrival System) written in FORTRAN, running on a UNIVAC 1108 mainframe.
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, and the price was raised from $50 to $695, and the software quickly became a huge success.
According to the [1] site, JPLDIS was the reason why Aston-Tate lost a lawsuit against FoxPro and SCO FoxPro over copyrights used by FoxPro that were claimed to belong to Ashton-Tate and the dBase product. In December 11, 1990, Judge Hatter issued an order invalidating Ashton-Tate's copyrights in its own dBASE products.
That ruling was based on a legal doctrine known as "unclean hands". Judge Hatter explained that Ashton-Tate knew that the dBase program development was based on JPLDIS, and that fact was kept hidden that from the Copyright Office. More on this can be found at [2] .
JPLDIS is important because it was the inspiration and precursor to dBASE, arguably one of the most influential DBMS programs for early microcomputers.
History
In the mid-1960's, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) was using an Tymeshare product named RETRIEVE. For reasons lost to history, in the late 60’s Jeb Long, a programmer at JPL, was assigned the task of writing a program which would support not only the same 4 basic functions as RETRIEVE, but many advanced features plus a programming language.By 1973 the program had evolved into a file management program called JPLDIS (Jet Propulsion Laboratory Database-management and Information-retrival System) written in FORTRAN, running on a UNIVAC 1108 mainframe.
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, and the price was raised from $50 to $695, and the software quickly became a huge success.
According to the [1] site, JPLDIS was the reason why Aston-Tate lost a lawsuit against FoxPro and SCO FoxPro over copyrights used by FoxPro that were claimed to belong to Ashton-Tate and the dBase product. In December 11, 1990, Judge Hatter issued an order invalidating Ashton-Tate's copyrights in its own dBASE products.
That ruling was based on a legal doctrine known as "unclean hands". Judge Hatter explained that Ashton-Tate knew that the dBase program development was based on JPLDIS, and that fact was kept hidden that from the Copyright Office. More on this can be found at [2] .
See Also
Vulcan (programming language) Fortran
Paradigm: multi-paradigm: procedural, imperative, structured, object-oriented
Appeared in: 1957
Designed by: John W. Backus
Developer: John W.
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Paradigm: multi-paradigm: procedural, imperative, structured, object-oriented
Appeared in: 1957
Designed by: John W. Backus
Developer: John W.
..... Click the link for more information.
dBase was the first widely used database management system (DBMS) for microcomputers, published by Ashton-Tate for CP/M, and later on the Apple II, Apple Macintosh, UNIX[1], VMS[2]
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A database management system (DBMS) is computer software designed for the purpose of managing databases. Typical examples of DBMSs include Oracle, DB2, Microsoft Access, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, FileMaker and Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise.
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Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is a NASA research center located in the cities of Pasadena and La Cañada Flintridge, near Los Angeles, California, USA. Managed by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), it builds and operates unmanned spacecraft for the National
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California Institute of Technology (commonly referred to as Caltech)[1] is a private, coeducational research university located in Pasadena, California, in the United States. Caltech maintains a strong emphasis on the natural sciences and engineering.
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Fortran
Paradigm: multi-paradigm: procedural, imperative, structured, object-oriented
Appeared in: 1957
Designed by: John W. Backus
Developer: John W.
..... Click the link for more information.
Paradigm: multi-paradigm: procedural, imperative, structured, object-oriented
Appeared in: 1957
Designed by: John W. Backus
Developer: John W.
..... Click the link for more information.
The UNIVAC 1108 was the second member of Sperry Rand's UNIVAC 1100 series of computers, introduced in 1964. Integrated circuits replaced the thin film memory that the UNIVAC 1107 used for register storage. Smaller and faster cores were used for main memory.
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C. Wayne Ratliff (born 1946, Trenton, Ohio) wrote the database program Vulcan. Raised in Ohio and Germany, he now resides in the Los Angeles area.
From 1969 to 1982, Ratliff worked for the Martin Marietta Corporation in a progression of engineering and managerial positions.
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From 1969 to 1982, Ratliff worked for the Martin Marietta Corporation in a progression of engineering and managerial positions.
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CP/M is an operating system originally created for Intel 8080/85 based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. Initially confined to single tasking on 8-bit processors and no more than 64 kilobytes of memory, later versions of CP/M added multi-user variations, and
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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 with software development centers spread across
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