dBASE Mac was a database management system for the Apple Macintosh, released by Ashton-Tate in 1987. Although the GUI was lauded in the press, the application was so slow that it became something of a joke in the industry. Sales were dismal, and Ashton-Tate eventually decided to give up on dBASE Mac and instead port dBASE IV to the Mac, complete with a DOS-like interface. The product was then sold to a series of third-party developers, but they had little success and it disappeared from the market in the mid-1990s. History Genesis dBASE Mac started life at a third-party developer, DigiCorp, a small two-person company in Salt Lake City. They had attempted to market it through other companies in 1984 as Hayden: Base via Hayden Software, a Mac publisher, TheBase and then °Base (Dot-Base, referring to a part of its internal syntax), but the product was not really ready and the deals fell through. Just before Christmas 1984, Ashton-Tate started negotiations with the developers, completing the deal early 1985. The developers moved to A-T's Glendale Development Center (where the PC versions of dBASE were developed) early in 1985. Development resumed in May, referred to by the code-name Dottie, referring to the earlier Dot-Base naming. Changing priorities At first the idea was to produce something similar to DigiCorp's original design, releasing a 1.0 in early 1986 and then following with a major upgrade late that year. However the product quickly became fouled in Ashton-Tate's management, who used it as a dumping ground for every buzzword feature that came along. 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. Sometime during this period, management saw the product as a migration path for all versions of dBASE, using the Mac as a testing ground before releasing it on the PC as well, thereby replacing their now-ageing dBASE core with a fully GUI-hosted object-oriented database. Apple had long evangelized Ashton-Tate on developing for the Mac, considering them to be one of the "big players" they needed to legitimize the Mac marketplace. 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