The xBase family of languages comes from Ashton Tate's DBase product. There were several descendants, and only some of them have retained importance. DBase was a database environment. Code was not compiled, but present with sources, and to execute DBase programs, a license of the product was needed.

- Nantucket Clipper Clipper was built to solve two main problems of DBase: only the developer had to have a license of the product, and the Clipper compiler built self contained executables (a sort of p-code, not machine code). Clipper was one of the most used development environments for database applications in the MS-DOS Area. The company was acquired by CA Computer Associates. As for DBase, Clipper had several descendants: Visual Objects, XBase++, Harbour (see below) More details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_(programming_language)

- Foxbase FoxPro - Ashton Tate dBase