JPLDIS(ID:2139/jpl002)

• FoxPro History Page - How it Started - JPLDIS: How Came The Idea JPL just bought 3 Univac 1108 computers. They were the first computers at JPL that you could access from terminals. It was great in 1970 for us computer types. However, many people at JPL didn't know what good it was and the top people wanted to have a killer applications that would draw users.
  
  One guy was using a program called Retrieve on a Tymeshare (TM) computer. It had 5 commands: Create, Modify, List, Delete, and Append that you could use to manipulate the database but the guy was doing useful work. So in 1971, they funded me and another person named Jack Hatfield to develop a database managuement program thats easy to use, easy to learn and easy to remember. English language verbs (COPY, DELETE, etc.) were used for commands with prepositional phrases (TO myfile FOR m_Today = "Wed").
  
  
• FoxPro History Page - How it Started - JPLDIS: How Came The Idea [In] 1971, they funded me and another person named Jack Hatfield to develop a database managuement program thats easy to use, easy to learn and easy to remember. English language verbs (COPY, DELETE, etc.) were used for commands with prepositional phrases (TO myfile FOR m_Today = "Wed").
  
  Jack Hatfield left JPL and I finished up the program. Anyway, I wrote the program in Fortran for the Univac 1108 computer. JPLDIS has 50 commands (I just looked at an old document) JPLDIS had lots of users at JPL and other government agencies.
  
• FoxPro History Page - How it Started - JPLDIS: How Came The Idea dBASE may be traced back to the mid 1960's in the form of a system called RETRIEVE, which was marketed by Tymshare Corporation. RETRIEVE was used by Jet Propulsion Laboratory of Pasadena,Calif. In the late 60?s Jeb Long, a new programmer at JPL, was assigned the task of writing a program which would perform the same functions as RETRIEVE.
  
  Back in 1973 he was a software engineer at the California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he developed a file management program called JPLDIS (Jet Propulsion Laboratory Display Information System) written in FORTRAN, running in a UNIVAC 1108 mainframe. He spent over 11 years at JPL, being responsible for many of the software development tasks of USA's space program, like the Mariner and Viking missions to Mars.
  
  JPLDIS was the precursor of dBASE, that runs in CP/M microcomputers