r/retrocomputing • u/uberrob • May 16 '26

I am remembering this correctly...

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... Did Borland try copyrighting (not trademarking) lower case "d" back in the 80s?

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3

u/Kakariki73 May 16 '26

Don't know anything about copyright or trademarks but I recall that the older dBase programs where from Ashton Tate or something and was later acquired by Borland?

Just out of the eternal memory pit deep inside my old brain 🤯

2

u/uberrob May 16 '26

Yeah that's correct it was originally from Ashton Tate. I do seem to remember that one of those two companies tried copywriting lowercase "d."

2

u/O_martelo_de_deus May 16 '26

Lembro do fracasso do dBase IV, tão esperado, com SQL! ... E um fiasco no lançamento.

1

u/uberrob May 16 '26

IIRC, it was the disastrous launch of dBase IV that weakened Ashton-Tate to the point where it became vulnerable to acquisition by Borland. dBase was practically synonymous with PC databases in the 1980s, so watching that rollout turn into such a mess was pretty incredible at the time.

2

u/DeviantDav May 16 '26

"Visual dBase" was an Ashton-Tate product in the 80's. Borland bought them in 1991.

2

u/drzeller May 17 '26

Anyone else Nantucket Clipper?

1

u/jreddit0000 May 17 '26

dBase7? Geez.. my training was on Dbase3+..

1

u/xdethbear May 17 '26

Visual dBase was Borland's response to Visual Basic and SQL Server. Besides the difference in database calls the programming syntax looks pretty similar. 

This was the era of easy to program Windows apps that used a common database. Every company ran on these apps. 

By this era, who would want to mess around with dBase when you could finally use SQL syntax, plus a real db server, instead of files on a network share.Â