Db3 Plus Software
The db3 file extension is associated with the SQLite relational database management system as well as other database systems, such as dBase III.The db3 database file is stored in simple text format and contains structure of database and database entries. It is viewable in any text editors or word processors.The db3 is not default file extension for SQLite databases, SQLite uses. File extension.The db3 file extension for SQL databases is used for example on Palm Pre smart phone to store contacts, call logs, etc.Updated: January 24, 2019. Recommended software programs are sorted by OS platform (Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android etc.)and possible program actions that can be done with the file: like open db3 file, edit db3 file, convert db3 file, view db3 file, play db3 file etc. (if exist software for corresponding action in File-Extensions.org's database).Hint:Click on the tab below to simply browse between the application actions, to quickly get a list of recommended software, which is able to perform the specified software action, such as opening, editing or converting db3 files.
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Contents.History The history of Ashton-Tate and dBASE are intertwined and as such, must be discussed in parallel.Early history: dBASE II (1981–1983) In 1978 programmer wrote Vulcan, a, to help him make picks for. Written in assembly language, it ran on the and was modeled on, a 1108 program used at and written by fellow programmer. Ashton-Tate was launched as a result of George Tate and Hal Lashlee having discovered Vulcan from Ratliff in 1981 and licensing it (there was never any Ashton). The original agreement was written on one page, and called for simple, generous royalty payments to Ratliff.Tate and Lashlee had already built two successful start-up companies by this time—Discount Software (whose president was Ron Dennis), which was one of the first to sell PC software programs through the mail to consumers, and Software Distributors (acting CEO at the time was Linda Johnson), (later renamed SofTeam )—which was one of the first wholesale distributors of PC software in the world.Vulcan was sold by SCDP Systems.
The founders needed to change the name of the software, because already had an operating system called Vulcan. Hal Pawluk, who worked for their advertising agency, suggested 'dBASE', including the.
He also suggested that the first release of the product 'II' would imply that it was already in its second version, and therefore would be perceived as being more reliable than a first release. The original manual was too complex from Pawluk's perspective, so he wrote a second manual, which was duly included in the package along with the first. Pawluk created the name for the new publishing company by combining George's last name with the fictional Ashton surname, purportedly because it was felt that 'Ashton-Tate' sounded better, or was easier to pronounce, than 'Lashlee-Tate'. In reality, George Edwin Tate did not have a pet parrot named Ashton, until after Hal Pawluk named the company. Because people kept calling the company asking to speak to Mr Ashton, this hidden tidbit of information became a PC industry insider joke.dBASE II had an unusual guarantee. Customers received a version of the software and a separate, sealed disk with the full version; they could return the unopened disk for a refund within 30 days.
The guarantee likely persuaded many to risk purchasing the $700 application. In 1981 the founders hired to be the chairman, president and CEO of their group of companies. The group was called 'Software Plus.' It did not trade under its own name, but was a holding company for the three startups: Discount Software, Software Distributors, and Ashton-Tate. Cole was given free rein to run the businesses, while George Tate primarily remained involved in Ashton-Tate. Lashlee was somewhat less involved on a day-to-day basis in Ashton-Tate by this time, although he was always aware of and up to speed on all three of the businesses, and was an active board member and officer of SPI.In June 1982 Cole hired Rod Turner as the director of OEM sales for Ashton-Tate.
In a few weeks Turner solved a sales commission plan issue, that had been bothering George Tate for some time, with the top performing salesperson (Barbara Weingarten, now Guerra), and Tate and Cole promoted Turner to be Vice President of world-wide sales three weeks after his initial hire. Turner was approximately the 12th employee of Ashton Tate. Since the company was truly boot-strapped, using no external venture capital, the founders did not make a practice of hiring experienced veterans, and most of the team at Ashton-Tate were young and enthusiastic, but inexperienced.
Jim Taylor was responsible for product management in the early days, and worked closely with Wayne Ratliff and the other key developers on dBASE II. In 1982 Perry Lawrence and Nelson Tso were the two developers who were employed at Ashton-Tate, while Wayne Ratliff employed Jeb Long from his royalty stream.IBM PC dBASE II was ported to the IBM PC (i.e. The MS-DOS operating system) and shipped in September 1982. Pawluk ran advertisements promoting dBASE II for the IBM PC for months before it shipped. When dBASE II for the IBM PC shipped, it was one of few major applications available on the PC, and that fact, combined with good promotion and sales in the US and internationally, caused dBASE II sales to grow rapidly. Turner expanded Aston-Tate's international distribution efforts and encouraged exclusive distributors in major markets to translate dBASE II from English to non-English versions.
The early presence of dBASE II in international markets, as IBM rolled out the PC in those markets, facilitated rapid growth in sales and market share for dBASE. At one point in 1983, the company's French distributor 'La Command Electronique' (whose owner was Hughes LeBlanc) claimed that 'one in ten buyers of a PC in France is buying dBASE II.' In the winter of 1982, Turner recruited the managing director (David Imberg, now David Inbar) for Ashton-Tate's first subsidiary, Ashton-Tate UK. Turner set a goal for Inbar of achieving 15% per month compound revenue growth in the first 18 months (using the prior UK distributor's volume as a starting point), which Inbar accomplished. He subsequently expanded Ashton-Tate's operations across Europe with subsidiaries in Germany and the Netherlands.
When Turner brought Inbar to the Culver City, California corporate headquarters of Ashton-Tate to be trained, the offices were so crowded that the only space available for Inbar was a small desk beside a large photocopier, with no phone line; the offices were so crowded that when Turner needed to conduct a confidential meeting, he would have it standing up in the nearby restroom.With the growing popularity of ever-larger hard drives on personal computers, dBASE II turned out to be a huge seller. For its time, dBASE was extremely advanced. It was one of the first database products that ran on a, and its programming environment (the dBASE language) allowed it to be used to build a wide variety of custom applications. Although microcomputers had limited memory and storage at the time, dBASE nevertheless allowed a huge number of small-to-medium-sized tasks to be automated. The value-added resellers (VARs) who developed applications using dBASE became an important early sales channel for dBASE.By the end of the fiscal year ending in January 1982, the firm had revenues of almost $3.7 million with an operating loss of $313,000 dollars.Among Cole's early acts was to hire an accountant to set up a financial system, install a management structure, and introduce processes to manage operations and orders. Cole's mission was 'to shift the balance of power from those who understand how computers work to those who need what computers can do.'
Cole licensed two products in 1982, building on his publishing background. These two unsuccessful products were launched in October 1982: The Financial Planner and The Bottom Line Strategist.
The Financial Planner was a sophisticated financial modeling system that used its own internal language - but it was not as widely appealing as spreadsheets like SuperCalc. The Bottom Line Strategist was a template financial analysis system that had very limited flexibility and function. Both were released at the same price as dBASE II, but neither product was aggressively marketed, and both were put into a benign-neglect mode by Turner when it became clear that they did not have sizable potential.Ashton-Tate: IPO and dBASE III (1983–1985) By the end of January 1983, the company was profitable. In February 1983 the company released dBASE II RunTime, which allowed developers to write dBASE applications and then distribute them to customers without them needing to purchase the 'full' version of dBASE. The growth in revenues was matched by a growth in employees.
The company hired its first Human Resources manager, put together its first benefits package, and moved headquarters to 10150 West Jefferson Boulevard in.In May 1983 Cole changed the name of the SPI holding company to be Ashton Tate, which put the company in the position of having a mail order company 'Discount Software' and 'Software Distributors' as subsidiaries. The newly renamed holding company promptly sold Discount Software and Software Distributors. Cole negotiated an agreement with Wayne Ratliff in which Ratliff exchanged his future royalty stream on dBASE into equity in Ashton Tate, thereby significantly increasing the profitability of the company.Cole also took steps to control its technology by creating an in-house development organization (headed by Harvey Jean, formerly of JPL, as VP engineering), and to diversify by funding two outside development teams: Forefront Corporation (the developer of the product that would later be named 'Framework') and Queue Associates. That Spring, Ashton Tate released. By the time of the November 1983, the company had grown to 228 employees. The IPO raised $14 million. When the fiscal year ended in January 1984, revenues had more than doubled to $43 million and net income had jumped from $1.1 million (fiscal 1983) to $5.3 million.“Such a market share would be the envy of or.”— PC Magazine on dBASE II's popularity, 1984By early 1984 InfoWorld estimated that Ashton-Tate was the world's sixth-largest microcomputer-software company.
DBASE II reportedly had 70% of the microcomputer-database market, with more than 150,000 copies sold. Ashton-Tate published a catalog listing more than 700 applications written in the language, and more than 30 book, audio, video, and computer tutorials taught dBASE. Other companies produced hundreds of utilities that worked with the database, which Ratliff believed contributed to Ashton-Tate's success; 'You might say it's because the software is incomplete.
There are 'problems' with dBASE—omissions for other software developers to fill'. He noted that 'If they weren't with us, they'd be against us', and Cole promised to always notify third parties before announcing a new product or changing dBase's marketing. In May the company announced, and in July shipped, dBASE III as the successor to dBASE II. July also saw the release of, an integrated office suite developed by Forefront Corporation and funded by Ashton-Tate. These were the company's first products released with copy protection schemes in an attempt to stop software piracy.dBASE III was the first release written in the to make it easier to support and port to other platforms.
To facilitate the, an automatic conversion program was used to convert the original Vulcan code from Z-80 and DOS 8088 assembly language code into C, which resulted in the beginnings of a difficult to maintain legacy code base that would haunt the company for many years to come. This also had the side effect of making the program run somewhat slower, which was of some concern when it first shipped. As newer machines came out the problem was erased through increased performance of the hardware, and the 'problem' simply went away.In fall 1984 the company had over 500 employees and was taking in $40 million a year in sales (with approximately $15 million in Europe), the vast majority of it from dBASE or related utilities.Ed Esber Ashton Tate held a large company wide convention aboard the in, California in early August, 1984 and presented the new product to hundreds of clients and staff. Right after the convention, George Tate suddenly died of a at the age of 40 on August 10, 1984. David Cole on October 29 announced his resignation and left for, leaving to become CEO.
Cole hired Esber because he was the marketing expert who launched and who built the first distribution channels for personal computer software. (VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet and is credited for sparking the personal computer revolution and was the first commercially successful personal computer software package.)During seven-year tenure, Ashton Tate had its most prosperous years and a few of its most controversial. It is also when Ashton-Tate became one of the 'Big Three' personal computer software companies who had weathered the early 1980s ', and was considered an equal of Microsoft and Lotus Development. Under his leadership Ashton-Tate sales grew over 600% from $40M to over $318M.In November, shortly after took over, dBASE III version 1.1 was released to correct some of the numerous bugs found in the 1.0 release. As soon as the 1.1 release shipped, development focus turned to the next version, internally referred to as dBASE III version 2.0.
Among other things, the 2.0 release would have a new kernel for increased speed, and new functions to improve application development.relationship with Wayne Ratliff, however, was tumultuous, and Ratliff quit several months later. Eventually a group of sales and marketing employees left to join Ratliff at Migent Corporation to compete with Ashton Tate. Later (January 1987), Ashton-Tate would sue Migent for alleged misappropriation of trade secrets. Ratliff would eventually approach about rejoining Ashton-Tate and insisting on reporting directly to him. Jeb Long took over as dBASE's main architect in Ratliff's absence.In October 1985 the company released dBASE III Developer's Edition. Internally this release was known as version 1.2. It had some of the new features expected to be in the upcoming 2.0 release, including the new kernel and features primarily useful to application developers.
1.2 was one of, if not the most stable dBASE versions that Ashton-Tate ever released. It was also one of the least known and most often forgotten. Mostly, it was a release to appease developers waiting for 2.0 (dBASE III+).In late 1985 the company moved its headquarters to the final location at 20101 Hamilton Avenue in.
Development was spread throughout, although dBASE development was centered at the offices.dBASE III+ and third party clones (1986–1987) dBASE III+, a version including character-based menus for improved ease-of-use, had troubles maturing and had to be recalled just prior to its release in early 1986 due to an incorrect setting in the copy-protection scheme. However the company handled this with some aplomb, and although some customers were affected, Ashton-Tate's handling of the problems did much to improve customer relations rather than sour them.
DBASE III+ would go on to be just as successful as dBASE II had been, powering the company to $318 million in sales in 1987.dBASE had grown unwieldy over the years, so started a project under Mike Benson to re-architect dBASE for the new world of client–server software. It was to be a complete rewrite, designed as the next generation dBASE.dBASE was a complex product, and a thriving industry sprung up to support it. A number of products were introduced to improve certain aspects of dBASE, both programming and day-to-day operations. As Ashton-Tate announced newer versions of dBASE, they would often decide to include some of the functionality provided by the third parties as features of the base system. Predictably, sales of the third-party version would instantly stop, whether or not the new version of dBASE actually included that feature. After a number of such announcements, the third-party developers started becoming upset.One particularly important addition to the lineup of third-party add-ons was the eventual release of dBASE, which would take a dBASE project and compile it and link it into a stand-alone runnable program.
This not only made the resulting project easy to distribute to end users, but it did not require dBASE to be installed on that machine. These compilers essentially replaced Ashton-Tate's own solution to this problem, a $395 per-machine 'runtime' copy of dBASE, and thereby removed one source of their income.
The granddaddy of the compilers was, from Nantucket Software. Eventually a number of these were developed into full-blown dBASE clones.was upset with the companies that cloned dBASE products, but was always supportive of the third-party developers who he viewed as an important part of the dBASE ecosystem. He did not believe nor support companies that cloned dBASE and leveraged the millions of dollars his shareholders had paid to market dBASE. Starting with minor actions, he eventually went to great lengths to stop cloners with cease-and-desist letters and threats of legal action. At one industry conference he even stood up and threatened to sue anyone who made a dBASE clone, shouting 'Make my day!'
This sparked great debates about the ownership of computer languages and chants of 'innovation not litigation'.As a result of this continued conflict, the third-party community slowly moved some of their small business customers away from dBASE. Fortunately for Ashton-Tate, large corporations were standardizing on dBASE.dBASE IV: Decline and fall (1988–1990) Ashton-Tate had been promising a new version of the core dBASE product line starting around 1986. The new version was going to be more powerful, faster, and easier to create databases with.
It would have improved indexes and networking, support internally as well as interacting with, and include a. Ashton-Tate announced dBASE IV in February 1988 with an anticipated release set for July of that year.
DBASE IV was eventually released in October 1988 as two products: Standard and Developer's editions.Unfortunately, dBASE IV was both slow and very buggy. Bugs are not at all that surprising in a major product update, something that would normally be fixed with a 'dot-one' release before too much damage was done. This situation had occurred with dBASE III for instance, and Ashton-Tate had quickly fixed the problems. However a number of issues conspired to make the dBASE IV 1.0 release a disaster. For one, while dBASE IV did include a compiler, it was not what the developer community was expecting. That community was looking for a product that would generate stand-alone, executable code, similar to.
The dBASE IV compiler did produce, but still required the full dBASE IV product to run the result. Many believed that Ashton-Tate intended dBASE IV to compete with and eliminate the third-party developers. The announcement alone did much to upset the livelihood of the various compiler authors. More problematic however was the instability of the program. The full scale of the problem only became obvious as more people attempted to use the product, especially those who upgraded to the new version. The bugs were so numerous that most users gave up, resigned to wait for a dot-one release.
As word got out, sales slumped as existing users chose to hold off on their upgrades, and new users chose to ignore the product.Neither of these issues would, by themselves, kill the product. DBASE had an extremely large following and excellent name recognition.
All that was needed was an update that addressed the problems. At the time of its release, there was a general consensus within Ashton-Tate that a bug-fix version would be released within six months of the 1.0 release. If that had happened, the loyal users might have been more accepting of the product.Rather than do that, Ashton-Tate management instead turned their attention to the next generation of applications, code named Diamond. Diamond was to be a new, integrated product line capable of sharing large sets of data across applications.
This effort had been underway for years and was already consuming many of the resources in the company's Glendale, Torrance, Walnut Creek and Los Gatos (Northern California Product Center) offices. However, once it became apparent that Diamond was years away from becoming a product, and with poor reviews and slipping sales of dBASE IV 1.0, Ashton-Tate returned its focus to fixing dBASE IV.It was almost two years before dBASE IV 1.1 finally shipped (in July 1990).
During this time many customers took the opportunity to try out the legions of dBASE clones that had appeared recently, notably and.Sales of dBASE had plummeted. The company had about 63% of the overall database market in 1988, and only 43% in 1989. In the final four quarters as a company, Ashton-Tate lost close to $40 million. In August 1989, the company laid off over 400 of its 1,800 employees. The Microsoft partnership for a version called the Ashton-Tate/Microsoft SQL Server also came to nothing, as Ashton-Tate's sales channels were not prepared to sell what was then a high-end database.
The first version of SQL Server also only ran on IBM OS/2, which also limited its success. A version of dBASE that communicated directly with SQL Server, called dBASE IV Server Edition, was released in 1990, and was reviewed as the best available client for SQL Server (in both Databased Advisor and DBMS magazines), but the product never gained traction and was one of the casualties of the Borland acquisition. Microsoft eventually released in this role instead.
Sale to Borland (1991) Esber had been trying to grow the company for years via acquisitions or combining forces with other software companies, including merger discussions with Lotus in 1985 and again in 1989. Ashton-Tate's strategically inept board passed up numerous opportunities for industry-changing mergers. Other merger discussions that Ashton-Tate's board rejected or reached an impasse on included,. (Microsoft would later acquire Fox Software after Borland acquired Ashton-Tate and the forced Borland to not assert ownership of the dBASE language.In 1990 Esber proposed a merger with Borland.
During the first discussions, the board backed out and dismissed Esber thinking him crazy to entertain a merger of equals (combining the companies at existing market valuations) with the smaller competitor Borland, and on February 11, 1991 replaced him as CEO with William P. 'Bill' Lyons. Lyons had been hired to run the non-dBASE business and heretofore had been unsuccessful.
Lyons would ship dBASE IV 1.1, a product Esber managed and was already in beta when let go.After giving the board a merger compensation package (including individual bonuses of $250 thousand) and giving the management team repriced options and, the board and Lyons reinitiated discussions with Borland, but this time structured as a take-over of Ashton-Tate with a significant premium over Ashton-Tate's current market valuation but substantially below the price Esber had negotiated.liked the deal and Borland stock would reach new highs shortly before and after the merger. Some considered the $439 million in stock they paid to be too much. , CEO of Borland, apparently did not consult with his management team prior to committing to acquire Ashton Tate over a weekend visit to Los Angeles.The Borland merger was not a smooth one. Borland had been marketing the database specifically to compete with dBASE, and its programmers considered their system to be far superior to dBASE.
The Paradox group was extremely upset whenever Kahn so much as mentioned dBASE, and an intense broke out within the company. Borland was also developing a competitor product called The Borland dBase Compiler for Windows. This product was designed by who led a small team developing this fast, object-oriented version of dBASE. It was when Borland showed the product to the Ashton-Tate team that they finally conceded that they had lost the battle for dBASE.Nevertheless, Kahn was observant of the trends in the computer market, and decided that both products should be moved forward to become truly -based. The OO-dBASE compiler was no more able to run under Windows than was dBASE IV, causing Borland to abandon both code bases in 1993 and spin up a new team to create a new product, eventually delivered as dBASE for Windows in 1994. Meanwhile, Paradox was deliberately downplayed in the developer market since dBASE was now the largest Borland product. Microsoft introduced Access in late 1992, and eventually took over almost all of the Windows database market.
Further, in the summer of 1992 Microsoft acquired Ohio-based Fox Software, makers of the dBASE-like products FoxBASE+. With Microsoft behind FoxPro, many dBASE and Clipper software developers would start working in FoxPro instead. By the time dBASE for Windows was released, the market hardly noticed. Microsoft appears to have neglected FoxPro subsequent to the acquisition, perhaps because they also owned and promoted Microsoft Access, a direct competitor to dBASE.
Certainly, the PC database market became a great deal less competitive as a result of their deal to buy FoxPro.When Borland eventually sold its and Paradox products to Novell, where they would be joined with Word Perfect in an attempt to match Microsoft Office, Borland was left with, which Esber had purchased in the late 1980s and had its origins as a derivative of the database work at. Borland's ongoing strategy was to refocus its development tools on the corporate market with client–server applications, so Interbase fitted in as a low-end tool and a good generic SQL database for prototyping. This proved to be the longest lasting and most positive part of the Ashton-Tate acquisition, ironic since it was almost an oversight and little known to Borland until they acquired Ashton-Tate.Overall, the Ashton-Tate purchase proved to be unsuccessful. ^ Powell, David B.
(February 7, 1984). PC Magazine (interview). Retrieved October 24, 2013.
^ Thomas K. Annis (August 14, 1984). The New York Times. Pournelle, Jerry (July 1980). Retrieved October 18, 2013. 'initial software, called dBASEII'.
Co-founder of Ashton-Tate. ^ Hart, Glenn A. (February 7, 1984). Retrieved October 24, 2013. Three years as Ashton Tate's First Vice President of Sales. Rod Turner's. Role in building Ashton Tate (dBASE).
^. September 19, 2013. Harvard Business School, Case Study, Ashton-Tate, 0-387-146. PC Magazine. February 7, 1984. P. 138Books Result. DBASE RunTime software package Missing or empty title=.
Caruso, Denise (April 2, 1984). Retrieved February 10, 2015. Layman, Don (February 7, 1984).
Retrieved October 24, 2013. Howard, William K.
(February 7, 1984). Retrieved October 24, 2013. Chin, Kathy (April 9, 1984). Retrieved February 4, 2015. (PDF). A native code compiler for dBase.later evolved.
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Chapman, Merrill R. (2006), 'Making Ed's Day', In Search of Stupidity: Over Twenty Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters, Second Edition, Apress, p. 78,. Mace, Scott (January 8, 1990), 'Defending the Dbase Turf', InfoWorld. From the product manager for dBASE IV Server Edition.
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InformationWeek,Oct.21,'91,p.15: 'The Justice Department had intervened. The consent decree permits the merger but. Borland may not sue any competitor for copyright infringement based on the dBase language.' ., Soft-Letter, June 1, 1989. Howard, William (May 8, 1989), 'Publisher Fishing for Independently Written Software', Palm Beach Post.
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'Borland Deal Is Completed', October 12, 1991Further reading. – from Ed Esber's official website contains host of articles and financial performance. – contains many notes on the early history of dBASE. – details the court case in which dBASE's history lost them the ability to claim copyright. Veit, Stan (1993). Stan Veit's History of the Personal Computer.
A remembrance of George Tate.