Emerald Bay - the forgotten dBase killer

Software
1

Does anyone remember Emerald Bay, the database that was meant to be the next big thing after dBase? It came out in 1988 (I think) and was written by Wayne Ratliff, the creator of dBase, and sold by Migent.

I’ve just rediscovered an application I wrote using the Eagle client front end back in 1988. It still runs under DosBox because I have the Emerald Bay database engine runtime. But I’ve lost the rest of the software. So far I’ve been to find very llittle info online, other than an Emerald Bay engine/server manual selling for far too much money. Would love to get a full copy of the software and manuals, but can’t find them anywhere.

2

I remember seeing mentions of it in magazines at the time, but never saw or used it, or knew anyone who had.

3

Thats a call from the past. Yes, I used Emerald Bay in …1993 with Vulcan.
We were testing it for a systems migration from a mainframe to PC’s so I wrote code to read a data dictionary and port the fixed width files to XBase files and also wrote a query builder tool. It did look promising at the time but DBXL Quicksilver and FoxPro were better in the long run and we never did the migration in the end.

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