The concept for dBase, the first widely used database management system for microcomputers, was the result of creator Wayne Ratcliffe’s joining a football pool at work. He wanted to find a way to win the pool, but after poring over five weeks’ worth of statistics in the newspaper, Ratcliffe decided that trying to figure out how to pick a winner by going from paper to paper “was too much to handle without a computer.” Within a week, Ratcliffe had forgotten about football and decided the world needed a natural-language database manager.
-posted by Nobius 3:02 PM 
