Standards Effort
By 1987 there were an increasing number of "clone" software products that mimicked dBASE. Each of these products had its own unique set of supported language features and syntax. As such, it was often very difficult to move code developed with one dBASE-like product to run in another one. (This was in contrast to older programming languages such as C or COBOL where due to published official standards, carefully developed code could possibly be run in a wide range of software environments.) While there were many cries for a standard for the dBASE programming language syntax, nothing would happen as long as Ashton-Tate asserted ownership of all-things dBASE.
Once Borland acquired Ashton-Tate in mid 1991 (and was apparently required to drop the lawsuits as an anti-trust related condition of the merger), such standardization efforts were given new life. An ANSI committee (ANSI/X3J19) was officially formed, and began regular meetings in 1992. Marc Schnapp was the first chairman, and the first meeting was held at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California which was essentially the birthplace of Vulcan and dBASE II. The group met on a regular basis in a variety of locations over the next few years, and representatives from most major vendors participated. But despite lip service from all the vendors on the need for a standard, no one seemed willing to change their product syntax to match that of a competitor.
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