dBASE was the dominant database management system for microcomputers in the early 1980s. It began as a program called Vulcan, written by Wayne Ratliff, and was relaunched as dBASE II by the company that became Ashton-Tate around 1980. The product first ran under CP/M and was later carried to MS-DOS, where it became a fixture of business computing. The dBASE II Command and Reference Guide and the dBASE II User’s Guide, both archived from the period, are the primary documentation for how the system worked.
What set dBASE apart from a simple file manager was its built-in programming language. Beyond storing records in tables, dBASE let users write command files, sequences of dBASE commands that could prompt for input, search and update records, perform calculations, and print reports. This made it possible to build complete custom applications, such as inventory systems or mailing-list managers, on an ordinary personal computer without a separate programming tool. The reference guides document the command set used to do this.
dBASE was often described as a relational database, though by strict definitions it was closer to a flat-file system with relational features layered on top. Its real strength was accessibility: it gave non-programmers in small businesses a practical way to keep structured data and write working programs against it, at a time when database software on larger machines was expensive and specialized.
The dBASE command language proved so influential that it outlived the original product. Compatible and competing products such as Clipper, FoxPro, and dBASE clones implemented the same language and file format, and the whole family came to be known generically as xBase. The .dbf file format that dBASE used for its tables became a de facto standard for exchanging tabular data and persisted in many other programs for decades.
dBASE itself moved through versions, with dBASE III and dBASE III Plus extending the original, and the brand passed through several owners as the microcomputer database market matured and consolidated. But the core idea, a database engine paired with an approachable command language for building applications, was established by the early Ashton-Tate releases documented in the archived manuals, and it shaped how a generation of small businesses managed their data.