Subject: George Tate, RIP

From: "computerclassics2000" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Dec 2009 19:06:28 -0000

Here is something a little off-topic, but of some interest to the die-hard TI-99 historian.

In the December 1984 issue of BYTE Magazine columnist Jerry Pournelle pays tribute to the passing of friend George Tate, who died of a heart attack at age 40 on August 10, 1984. Tate is remembered in microcomputer history for founding the Ashton-Tate software firm with Hal Lashlee. Tate would acquire the rights to a data base manager written by Wayne Ratliff named Vulcan and market it as dBase II. dBase II (and it's subsequent updates) was a multi-million dollar seller in the 1980s as a programmable data base manager for the CP/M and DOS platforms.

The credit for making dBase II a market success is given to Ed Esber, who had previously worked for Texas Instruments in Lubbock from 1978-79, in the Consumer Products Division, working in product marketing on Personal Computers.

dBase II is of course the source of inspiration for Dennis Faherty's TI-Base programmable data base manager created for the TI-99/4A.

BillG