Wayne Ratliffe, who worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, created Vulcan for the Apple computer. Vulcan included a language which was easy to learn, and it could be used to manage a database on a microcomputer.

Tate bought the rights to Vulcan and hired Ratliffe for the new company formed to create the IBM PC version and market it. The IBM PC version was called dBase II and the company formed was Ashton-Tate. There never was an Ashton and there never was a dBase I. But the II inspired greater confidence on the part of the buyer (that the bugs had been ironed out in version I), and Ashton-Tate sounded more British/European, giving it an International flavor.

dBase II quickly took over as one of the most important developments in the PC world besides word processing and spreadsheets. It provided the standard for early database work on the PCs. There was a language attached, giving it a great deal of flexibility.

FoxBase imitated dBase's language and environment and charged less. It became an alternative to dBase, a clone. Ashton-Tate sued Fox and lost. The court ruled that dBase II was not a significant advance over the copyrighted Vulcan. This was an important court case.

Nantucket created Clipper, a standalone language clone for dBase. They made no effort however to imitate the dBase programming environment. Instead, they focused on what they called "open architecture." They enabled other companies to write special-purpose libraries which could extend the capabilities of the language. Hundreds of libraries were created. This expanded the database industry and the pool of database programmers enormously.

Ashton-Tate remained primarily a one-product company. Although they were very dependent on the pool of dBase programmers, Ashton-Tate often ignored them. AT for example would not have a presence at Programmer Conferences. With the failure of the AT suit against FoxBase, the programming community decided to change the designation of the pool to XBase programmers to show their displeasure with AT. This designation continues today.

Ashton-Tate however did not survive. They did attempt to broaden their company base by buying Multi-Mate as a Word Processor which they would integrate with their flagship product, dBase. They did generate a dBase III as well. But Multi-Mate was difficult to use, unpopular, and as such not a very good choice in the long run. AT was sold to Borland Corporation, which has continued the database support through today's dBase V for Windows. But the preeminence of dBase was already lost when Borland took over the product.

FoxBase was bought by Microsoft, which quickly converted it into a Windows product. FoxBase became the first full database language/environment for Windows. Although Microsoft Access already existed, FoxPro for Windows III provided a wide user base for Microsoft in the database world. In 1998, FoxPro V for Windows has continued as a strong contender in the database world.