George Tate and Hal Lashlee had built two successful start-up companies - Discount Software was one of the first to sell PC software programs through the mail to consumers, and Software Distributors which was one of the first wholesale distributors of PC software in the world.
•
He used this as the basis for a port to PTDOS on his kit-built IMSAI 8080 microcomputer, and called the resulting system Vulcan (after Mr. Spock on Star Trek).
These included Z80 Assemblers and debuggers, Pro Pascal and Pro Fortran, TCL Pascal, dBase II, Wordstar 3.3, Peachtree Accounting applications, the Superfile database and CP/M versions of Hisoft Pascal, Modula-2, Z80 Assembler and text editor.
A full decade before Oracle, Access, Alpha Five, dBASE, DB2, and other DBMS programs were available, Infodata had a working database solution.
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.