dBase IV tanked the dBase Line. dBase III+ was an amazing product - that everyone used, was super reliable - I made a ton[1] of money in college writing up, te

dBase IV tanked the dBase Line. dBase III+ was an amazing product - that everyone used, was super reliable - I made a ton[1] of money in college writing up, teaching dBase III+ systems (Along with with FoxBase PRO). When dBase IV came out (From Ashton Tate, Not Borland) it was buggy, and much of the stuff in the user manual literally did not work. I was super excited about the SQL support in dBase IV - until after an entire evening of trying to get it to work I realized they had shipped non-functional code. Not buggy - it just didn't actually work as documented. Ended the company. (They came up with massive patches years later - but it was too late - people had moved on). I would love to read a story on how they decided to ship a product that was essentially still 12-18 months from being completed. I'm guessing (?) they were about to run out of cash - and selling something, even if it didn't work, kept the lights on? Hard to believe given how dominant dBase III+ was back then. [1] Where, by ton, I mean many, many hundreds of dollars. Which felt like a lot of money back then.