dBASE Mac started life at a third-party developer, DigiCorp, a small two-person company in Salt Lake City.

Eventually the original 1.0 design was abandoned and the decision was made to move directly to what was to have been the 2.0 release, the most notable change being to include an object oriented programming language.

Although Apple's upper management remained committed to this vision, after waiting three years since the release of the Mac, others in the company were becoming increasingly frustrated with the seemingly never ending development cycles.

Things came to a head when Guy Kawasaki convinced Apple to option a new advanced database program then known as "Silver Surfer".

The developers were worried that customers would not be impressed with getting a product that was called dBASE only to find it didn't even work with the DOS version.

[6] Reviewers also universally noted the slow performance, one going so far to state it was difficult to tell if the program had crashed, which it did a lot, or was simply taking a long time to complete a task.

The company abandoned the idea of using the Mac as a testing ground for all future versions of the system, dooming it to remain an orphan.

A year later Ashton-Tate gave up on the product entirely, and decided to instead port their latest PC database, dBASE IV, to the Mac.

1.3 proved to be considerably more stable and faster than the Ashton-Tate versions, although this did little to help given the product's reputation, which the press considered undeserved by this point.

Instead, in the spring of 1992 they released a "32-bit clean" nuBASE Pro 1.5, which allowed it to run on Apple's latest operating systems and PowerMac machines.