The Jet Propulsion Laboratory Display Information System (or JPLDIS) is a file management program written in FORTRAN.
[1][2] In the late 1960s, Fred Thompson at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) was using a Tymshare product named RETRIEVE to manage a database of electronic calculators.
In 1971 Fred collaborated with Jack Hatfield, a programmer at JPL, to write an enhanced version of RETRIEVE which became the JPLDIS project.
In 1978, while at JPL, Wayne Ratliff wrote a database program in assembly language for CP/M based microcomputers to help him win the football pool at the office.
Judge Hatter explained that Ashton-Tate knew that the dBase program development was based on JPLDIS, and that fact was kept hidden from the Copyright Office.