An interactive DBMS, originally from Ashton-Tate Corporation, and the language used by it. dBase evolved from Vulcan by Wayne Ratliffe, which came out in around 1980 and ran on CP/M. It was called dBaseII when sold to Ashton-Tate Corporation. The first release was dBase II, ca 1980. There never was a "dBase I". Later versions included: dBase III, dBase III+, and dBase IV. Ashton-Tate was taken over in the early 1990s by what became Borland Software Corporation who sold dBase in March(?) 1999 to the newly formed dBase Inc. dBase Inc' s first release was Visual dBase 5.7, a Y2K upgrade to Visual dBase 5.x. Current version, as of 2003-11-24: dBase PLUS 2.0x build 1703. dBase Start . (2003-11-24)