dBASE III Plus v1.1

Ashton-Tate dBase was an early popular database management system for CP/M and MS-DOS. It was regarded as one of the killer applications for CP/M, and achieved good success. At the time of conception Ashton-Tate was a garage based company but quickly grew.

In 1982, enjoying large success on CP/M, dBASE II was ported to DOS and the IBM PC. By the start of 1984 dBASE II had retained about 70% of the computer database market with over 150,000 copies sold.

In 1988, after years of promises to rewrite, Ashton-Tate released dBASE IV. This version would be seen as its downfall, as it was slow, buggy, slow, incompatible, slow, and unable to compete against newer SQL offerings. It was eventually sold to Borland in 1991, who then continued to sell dBase III Plus as well as IV. Many dBASE developers would eventually start working in the closely related Fox Software / Microsoft FoxPro system.

Ashton-Tate also released a Macintosh database under the dBase name, called "dBase Mac". It was acquired from another company and was not directly related to the DOS dBase product, although it had reportedly been considered as a basis for a new DOS rewrite instead of dBase IV.

Wanted: dBase III Plus distributed by Borland.

Screenshots

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Release notes

dBASE III+ introduced numerous new features, including a character based menu system. The first revision was copy protected; however it was still a widely successful product. It earned Ashton-Tate $300 million in 1987's sales.

A large 3rd party industry sprung up to support dBASE with addons. Ashton-Tate charged a whopping $395 for a per-machine runtime. As a result, one popular type of addon to the dBASE system were compilers which transformed a dBASE project into a standalone executable, thereby negating any need for a runtime. The most popular compiler was Clipper from Nantucket Software.

Installation instructions

For DOS "IBM PC, PC/XT, PC/AT, 3270 PC and 100% compatibles"

Wanted: Manual scan, the later Borland re-release

Note: this version is not copy protected, however each system 1 and administrator 1 disk contains a unique serial number in the file dbase.ser.