X-Nico

3 unusual facts about Wayne Ratliff


Jet Propulsion Laboratory Display Information System

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.

Natural language understanding

For example, Wayne Ratliff originally developed the Vulcan program with an English-like syntax to mimic the English speaking computer in Star Trek.

XBase

While there was a non-commercial predecessor to the Ashton-Tate product (Vulcan written by Wayne Ratliff), most clones are based on Ashton-Tate's 1986 dBASE III+ release — scripts written in the dBASE III+ dialect are most likely to run on all the clones.



see also