Origin

In the early 80s, David Clark met Dr. George Gratzer, a mathematics professor at the University of Manitoba

University of Manitoba

The University of Manitoba , in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, is the largest university in the province of Manitoba. It is Manitoba's most comprehensive and only research-intensive post-secondary educational institution. It was founded in 1877, making it Western Canada’s first university. It placed...

, at ComputerLand in Winnipeg where Dr Gratzer was looking for someone who could program in dBase. Mr Clark had been using dBase II in his consulting practice, but was frustrated by its limitations for reporting on more than 3 tables at a time. While working for Standard Knitting (a client of Dr. Gratzer's and Mr Clark's), David undertook to write a report generator that would allow up to six related data files to be in use at one time and run faster than the slow, dBase II.

Finding the task required creation of a compiler, an expression evaluator and the ability to read and create indices, David soon realized that they had most of what they needed to create an independent language. The year 1985 saw the first appearance of the language, dComp (standing for "compiled dBase"), and Sid Bursten's joining their new company, Sub Rosa Inc., as vice president of marketing. The language was renamed Max, new manuals were written by Dr. Gratzer and printed, and an ad campaign started. Through their partnership in Sub Rosa, David designed and wrote the program while Dr Gratzer wrote the Reference and Tutorial Manuals.

For programmers, VP-Info had several interesting capabilities, including the ability to change field names easily, to represent fields in array form, and to set individual bits within strings (which enabled the use of bitmaps to represent up to 2,056 logical variables for each string field in the database).

Marketing

Shortly thereafter, Paperback Software International Ltd.

Paperback Software International Ltd.

Paperback Software International Ltd. was a software company founded in the 1980s by Adam Osborne, Paperback Software was dedicated to the proposition that computer software cost too much, and that software such as word processors and spreadsheets should be available in the US$20 range...

, a publishing firm headed by Adam Osborne

Adam Osborne

Adam Osborne was an American author, book and software publisher, and computer designer who founded several companies in the United States and elsewhere.- Computers :...

 of Osborne Books and Osborne Computer Corporation

Osborne Computer Corporation

The Osborne Computer Corporation was a pioneering maker of portable computers.-The Osborne 1:After Adam Osborne sold his computer book-publishing company to McGraw-Hill in 1979, he decided to sell an inexpensive portable computer with bundled software and hired Lee Felsenstein to design it...

 fame, acquired worldwide marketing rights to Max and launched it as VP-Info in 1986. VP-Info hit the market with a splash, steadily rising to the Top Five among best-selling business titles in the U.S. software market selling in excess of 30,000 copies worldwide by the end of 1988. Unfortunately, Lotus Development Corp. objected to some of the features of VP-Planner 3D, a Lotus look-alike with a number of features beyond those of 1-2-3

Lotus 1-2-3

Lotus 1-2-3 is a spreadsheet program from Lotus Software . It was the IBM PC's first "killer application"; its huge popularity in the mid-1980s contributed significantly to the success of the IBM PC in the corporate environment.-Beginnings:...

 (e.g., underlying 5-dimensional database from which 3-dimensional spreadsheets could be extracted), and sued Paperback Software for copyright infringement in 1989. Though the lawsuit ultimately failed in the courts, it succeeded (in Bill Gates

Bill Gates

William Henry "Bill" Gates III is an American business magnate, investor, philanthropist, and author. Gates is the former CEO and current chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen...

' famous phrase) in "cutting off the air supply" for Paperback and it slowly bled to death.

Sub Rosa Inc. reacquired worldwide distribution rights to VP-Info shortly before it entered bankruptcy. Mr. Bursten and an associate, Bernie Melman of Toronto, established Sub Rosa Publishing Inc. in Toronto and Sub Rosa Corporation in Minneapolis and attempted to get VP-Info back into distribution. Since the name belonged to the bankrupt Paperback Software, however, they were forced to give it yet another name, and Sharkbase was introduced in 1992 as an upgrade to VP-Info. That year the magazine Data Based Advisor published a nationwide poll of database-language users that named VP-Info Number One in both "Performance of Product" and "Performance of Applications Developed" in the product.

Following Mr. Melman's death in 1993, however, the two publishing companies were closed. Sub Rosa continues to sell product and support users.

VP-Info and Sharkbase are still in use at numerous companies who depend on its speed, reliability and mathematical prowess to drive their businesses. Probably the largest of these is Specialized Clinical Services of Irvine, California, which has used it to build the preeminent clinical software package for infusion pharmacy since 1986.