JPLDIS

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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 dBASE, arguably one of the most influential DBMS programs for early microcomputers.

[edit] History

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.

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.

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