But whereas
Ashton-Tate founder George Tate (Ashton was the name of his pet parrot) had recognised and appreciated the role of that ecosystem, Harvard MBA Ed Esber, who took over when Tate died of a heart attack, resented their success.
acquired
Ashton-Tate Corporation, the developer of a de facto standard - the dBase database programming language - and a vendor of database management software.
As sales doubled in just 2 years and Borland integrated into its operations the acquisition of rival software house
Ashton-Tate, stock keeping units soared right along with customer orders.
Since I had worked with dBase III + (
Ashton-Tate Corp., Torrance, Calif.) for a couple of years, I decided to explore using that program for our database.
The list of companies involved in intellectual property lawsuits reads like a who's who of the high-tech world: Lotus,
Ashton-Tate, IBM, Fujitsu, Computer Associates, and the Santa Cruz Operation, to name a few.
Dbase, a data base product sold by
Ashton-Tate, Inc., was considered for many years the data base standard.
After the hue and cry of dBase subscribers grew loud enough,
Ashton-Tate (the producers of dBase) finally un-copy protected their software.
Ashton-Tate came out with DBASE Ill for the IBM, but the new Apples couldn't run it.
The addition of
Ashton-Tate was his only change this month, and it promptly fell a couple of points.
For a start, I learned that
Ashton-Tate, Claris, Lotus, Microsoft, Retix and other software companies have offices in Ireland.
Firms like WordPerfect, Lotus,
Ashton-Tate, Sybase and Adobe offer products.
Microsoft, Sun, Tandem, General Electric, McDonnell Douglas, Apple, Wang,
Ashton-Tate, IBM, AT&T and Digital Equipment Corporation operate in this sector.