A retrospective on the decline and end of dBase, the once-dominant PC database platform. Covers how Ashton-Tate's aggressive litigation and neglect in the late 1980s eroded developer trust, how Borland's mismanagement led to lost source code, and how predatory third-party vendors trapped enterprise customers on aging 16-bit and 32-bit systems through the 2010s. Notes that dBase LLC's newsgroup servers went offline in November 2025, effectively marking the platform's death. Ends on a hopeful note: modern frontier AI models (Claude, ChatGPT) can now parse legacy .PRG, Clipper, and FoxPro code and translate it into modern languages like Rust, Go, or Dart, offering an escape route for those still trapped in the ecosystem.
Table of contents
1979-1995: Legacy dBase years1995-2012: dBase for Windows era and BDE1996: dBase Source Code Lost2012-2019: The Pension Money Hostage SituationNew discovery: AI Reads dBase Object Code98 Impressions