Here is an excerpt from the book "Java Database Development" by Martin Rinehart. Copyright © 1998 The McGraw-Hill Companies. It is available on line at http://www.books24x7.com.

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A Fast History of the DBF

In the 1970s, NASA's Jeb Long invented a data-handling language and implemented it on a mainframe computer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena. (Rocket science has more sex appeal, but space exploration involves keeping track of lots of nuts and bolts, too.) Long's language, known as JPLDIS ("JIP-uhl-dis"—Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Display Information System) made it easy to define and implement tables. It enabled you to add, edit, and delete records in these tables. And it let you perform the basic relational operations, such as joining tables.

Another programmer at JPL, Wayne Ratliff, had an early, 8-bit microcomputer at home as a hobby. He decided to implement Long's fourth-generation language (4GL) on his microcomputer. The first application was to keep track of the office football pool.

Wayne worked in Z-80 assembler. (The Z-80 was an 8-bit microprocessor that dominated the early, hobbyist period of the development of personal computers.) He managed to code the database work and an interpreter for the 4GL, and to still provide data space within his 48K RAM space. (The early operating system, CP/M, took less than 4K of this space.)

Wayne began marketing his program to other hobbyists. He named it Vulcan. It came to the attention of Hal Lashlee and George Tate, who were running an early software distribution company out of Tate's garage. They acquired marketing rights and renamed the product dBASE II.

George partnered with a marketing professional, Hal Pawluk, in promoting the product. (Lashlee, an accountant, didn't get involved in day-to-day operations.) Through a combination of brilliant marketing and the simple fact that dBASE II was a superior product in its day, this became the leading database-management software for CP/M-based computers. They named their company Ashton-Tate.

Would they have succeeded selling "dBASE I" from "Lashlee-Tate"? They might have, because the product was better than its competitors. Certainly success came more rapidly and market dominance was more complete because of Ashton-Tate's early marketing orientation.

The introduction of the PC in 1981 and then of the PC-XT in 1983 (the latter featured a whopping 10MB hard disk, the first from a major manufacturer) helped make the personal computer a viable machine for small database work. While some companies stumbled (the inventors of the spreadsheet lost their market lead to PC-specific upstart Lotus Development; the dominant WordStar word-processing program was overtaken by WordPerfect), Ashton-Tate continued to dominate databases.

The dBASE data format was published by Ashton-Tate, which actively encouraged others to use it. Spreadsheets read DBF files (tables map nicely into spreadsheets). Word processors used the DBF format for mail-merge applications. Graphics programs read DBFs. (In the early days, graphing was a separate application, not part of every spreadsheet and word processor.) And, of course, competing database products accessed DBF-based data.

The dBASE product is still available from Borland, although that company has hinted that they may have released the last version of the product. The Xbase language is still used in Microsoft's FoxPro and CA's Clipper products. And the DBF format is still a widely used, de facto standard in numerous PC applications.
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Hope this helps.