dBASE III v1.0

Ashton-Tate dBase was an early popular database management system for CP/M and MS-DOS. It was regarded as one of the killer applications for CP/M, and achieved good success. At the time of conception Ashton-Tate was a garage based company but quickly grew.

In 1982, enjoying large success on CP/M, dBASE II was ported to DOS and the IBM PC. By the start of 1984 dBASE II had retained about 70% of the computer database market with over 150,000 copies sold.

In 1988, after years of promises to rewrite, Ashton-Tate released dBASE IV. This version would be seen as its downfall, as it was slow, buggy, slow, incompatible, slow, and unable to compete against newer SQL offerings. It was eventually sold to Borland in 1991, who then continued to sell dBase III Plus as well as IV. Many dBASE developers would eventually start working in the closely related Fox Software / Microsoft FoxPro system.

Ashton-Tate also released a Macintosh database under the dBase name, called "dBase Mac". It was acquired from another company and was not directly related to the DOS dBase product, although it had reportedly been considered as a basis for a new DOS rewrite instead of dBase IV.

Wanted: dBase III Plus distributed by Borland.

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Release notes

dBase III r1.0 (Not to be confused with dBase III Plus) was the first big update to the dBase product under Ashton-Tate. It adds features to assist beginners, and although not a radical change over dBase II, it adds additional programming features while removing some limitations.

This version was written as a port to the C programming language, and made use of features specific to the IBM PC.

Important: This software is copy protected. The unprotect "db3v30" is known to work with this version. This software uses laser hole copy protection, which can NOT be duplicated by disk copiers. Writing the provided images files can NOT product a usable disk. This copy protection method will fail in most emulators.

Note: This version may have issues running on AT 286 or later computer.

Wanted: dBase III r1.0 second edition (copy protected), dBase III Plus r1.0 (copy protected)