Who founded Ashton-Tate?
Ashton-Tate
In 1978 Martin Marietta programmer Wayne Ratliff wrote Vulcan, a database application, to help him make picks for football pools. Written in Intel 8080 assembly language, it ran on the CP/M operating system and was modeled on JPLDIS,[1] a Univac 1108 program used at JPL and written by fellow programmer Jeb Long. Ashton-Tate was launched as a result of George Tate and Hal Lashlee having discovered Vulcan from Ratliff in 1981 and licensing it (there was never any Ashton). The original agreement was written on one page, and called for simple, generous royalty payments to Ratliff.
Robert Ashton (historian)
Ashton was born on 21 July 1924. He was educated at Magdalen College School, Oxford, an all boys independent school in Oxford. He joined the Royal Air Force in 1943. After the end of World War II, he left the RAF in 1946. He attended University College, Southampton the predecessor to the University of Southampton. He graduated with a first class Bachelor of Arts (BA) in History. He went on to study at the London School of Economics under R. H. Tawney. His doctoral thesis was on the subject of the early Stuart Monarchs.