Since the company was truly boot-strapped, using no external venture capital, the founders did not make a practice of hiring experienced veterans, and most of the team at Ashton-Tate were young and enthusiastic, but inexperienced.

Jim Taylor was responsible for product management in the early days, and worked closely with Wayne Ratliff and the other key developers on dBASE II.

Turner expanded Ashton-Tate's international distribution efforts and encouraged exclusive distributors in major markets to translate dBASE II from English to non-English versions.

At one point in 1983, the company's French distributor "La Commande Electronique" (whose owner was Hughes LeBlanc) claimed that "one in ten buyers of a PC in France is buying dBASE II."

It was one of the first database products that ran on a microcomputer, and its programming environment (the dBASE language) allowed it to be used to build a wide variety of custom applications.

Both were released at the same price as dBASE II, but neither product was aggressively marketed, and both were put into a benign-neglect mode by Turner when it became clear that they did not have sizable potential.

The company hired its first Human Resources manager, put together its first benefits package, and moved headquarters to 10150 West Jefferson Boulevard in Culver City.

Such a market share would be the envy of Procter & Gamble or General Motors.By early 1984 InfoWorld estimated that Ashton-Tate was the world's sixth-largest microcomputer-software company.

Ashton Tate held a large company wide convention aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California, in early August, 1984 and presented the new products like Friday!

It is also when Ashton-Tate became one of the "Big Three" personal computer software companies who had weathered the early 1980s "shakeout", and was considered an equal of Microsoft and Lotus Development.

dBASE III+, a version including character-based menus for improved ease-of-use, had troubles maturing and had to be recalled just prior to its release in early 1986 due to an incorrect setting in the copy-protection scheme.

These compilers essentially replaced Ashton-Tate's own solution to this problem, a $395 per-machine "runtime" copy of dBASE, and thereby removed one source of their income.

This effort had been underway for years and was already consuming many of the resources in the company's Glendale, Torrance, Walnut Creek and Los Gatos (Northern California Product Center) offices.

[citation needed] Other merger discussions that Ashton-Tate's board rejected or reached an impasse on included Cullinet, Computer Associates, Informix, Symantec and Microsoft.

During the first discussions, the board backed out and dismissed Esber thinking him crazy to entertain a merger of equals (combining the companies at existing market valuations) with the smaller competitor Borland,[23] and on February 11, 1991, replaced him as CEO with William P. "Bill" Lyons.

After giving the board a merger compensation package (including individual bonuses of $250 thousand) and giving the management team repriced options and golden parachutes, the board and Lyons reinitiated discussions with Borland, but this time structured as a take-over of Ashton-Tate with a significant premium over Ashton-Tate's current market valuation but substantially below the price Esber had negotiated.

[citation needed] Philippe Kahn, CEO of Borland, apparently did not consult with his management team prior to committing to acquire Ashton Tate over a weekend visit to Los Angeles.

In the end, the poor quality[citation needed] and extremely late release of dBASE IV drove existing customers away and kept new ones from accepting it.

This loss of revenue for the cash cow was too much for the company to bear, and combined with management missteps, eventually led to the sale to the upstart Borland International.

Framework, like dBASE before it, was the brainchild of a single author, Robert Carr, who felt that integrated applications offered huge benefits over a selection of separate apps doing the same thing.

Framework was an integrated DOS-based document-based office suite with an interactive computer language named FRED that combined in an outliner a word processor, spreadsheet, mini-database application, charting tool, and a terminal program.

What was originally a deliberate attempt to copy the Wang system now made the product seem hopelessly outdated, and it would require a major upgrade to remain useful.

This method of working was in contrast to the more directly interactive WYSIWYG approach taken by Aldus PageMaker and Ventura Publisher, which became more popular as windowing systems and GUIs became more common.

A flat-file database program launched in October 1986 that was commonly used to create mailing labels and form letters on PCs running the DOS operating system.

Ed Esber and Apple Computer chairman John Sculley jointly announced Ashton Tate's family of Mac products in Palo Alto, California.

Releases of Microsoft Word and Excel soon closed some of the feature gaps, and as the Mac OS changed the products became increasingly difficult to run.

Microsoft embarked on a campaign in earnest to discredit and kill Ashton-Tate's products, at one time exaggerating the system requirements for FullWrite, and going so far as to delete Ashton Tate software from Mac dealers' demonstration computers.

[citation needed] FullWrite was later sold off by Borland in 1994 to Akimbo Systems, but by that time Microsoft Word had achieved market domination and they, too, eventually gave up on it.

During the initial proceedings it was learned that dBASE's file format and language had been based on a mainframe product used at JPL, where Ratliff had been working when he first created Vulcan.

When the federal judge reviewed the work of his clerks he overturned his earlier ruling, and decided to hear the case on whether or not Ashton-Tate owned the language.