History
DAL started as a 3rd party product, CL/1 (Connectivity Language One), from a small vendor, Network Innovations. Apple purchased the company in 1988, during a time that client/server databases were becoming a hot issue in the industry. They released their first version of the re-branded software in 1989, for MVS, and followed with other versions over the next year or so.
DAL suffered from most Apple problems of the early 1990s, notably an alternating level of support in which Apple would aggressively promote the product and then ignore it. Throughout, the company struggled with promoting the system as a cross-platform standard, or as a Mac-only technology. DAL's release was also coincident with Apple's fall from grace in the business world, and not coincidentally with Microsoft's ODBC efforts.
DAL appears to have seen little use, and eventually Apple sold it to Independence Technologies in 1994, during a sell-off of a number of "high-end" packages such as their X.400 server and an SNA client. Independence Technologies was a middleware vendor, better known as a major reseller of the Tuxedo product for Unix. In 1995 BEA Systems bought the company, and in turn sold it to Uniprise in late 1996. No releases took place during this period.
Read more about this topic: Data Access Language
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