Biography
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's home planet in the Star Trek world) and based it on Jeb Long's JPLDIS. Ratliff said he wrote the program to help win the football pool at the office. He marketed it by himself from 1979 to 1980, but 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. 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. 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.
In 1988 Ratliff wrote Emerald Bay, a client/server database manager. Currently retired, Ratliff spends time sailing and studying mathematics. He has worked on computer systems for use in competitive sailboat racing.
Read more about this topic: Wayne Ratliff
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