Wayne Ratliff
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C. Wayne Ratliff (born 1946, Trenton, Ohio) wrote the database program dBASE II. 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. 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.
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. Ratliff says he wrote the program to help win the football pool at the office. He marketed it by himself from 1979 to 1980, but the headaches of handling all the orders proved too much, and he solicited no new sales.
In late 1980 he met George Tate, who found the product worthwhile. He entered into a marketing agreement with Ashton-Tate and renamed the Vulcan product dBASE. Ratliff had given up trying to sell copies of the software for $50 each. Tate thought the product 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.
The program was renamed dBASE II because of a belief that a product called "version one" wouldn't sell. The software originally ran on a CP/M computer and then was ported to the IBM PC. A bit of trivia: there was never an actual person named Ashton. Rather, the company kept a macaw named Ashton as an unofficial mascot.
