Hey Mark,
Thanks for your concern and additional input. Below is something I found about the history of dBase you may find interesting. I used the original dBase-II on an Apple IIe with a CP/M card in '79 or '80. That's how old I am!
I tried to reinstall dBase from the original 5 1/2" floppies but I got the same error.
"Wayne Ratliff
From 1969 to 1982, Wayne Ratliff worked for the Martin Marietta Corporation in a progression of engineering and managerial positions. He was a member of the NASA Viking Flight Team when the Viking spacecraft landed on Mars in 1976, and wrote the data-management system, MFILE, for the Viking lander support software.
In 1978, he wrote a database program in assembly language, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Passadena, California. He called it Vulcan (after Mr. Spock of Star Trek), that was based on Jeb Long's JPLDIS. This program was written to help him win the football pool at the office, which he marketed by himself from 1979 to 1980. Vulcan had its ups and downs and by 1980 was in what seemed to be a permanent down state.
Ratliff was born in 1946 in Trenton, Ohio and raised in various cities and towns in Ohio and Germany. He now resides in the Los Angeles area.
In late 1980 he met George Tate, who found the product worth while and entered into a marketing agreement with Ashton-Tate and renamed the Vulcan product dBASE H. Wayne had given up trying to sell copies of it for $50 each. George told him that he thought it would sell better at $695, so they made a deal and dBASE II was the result. In mid-1983, Ashton-Tate purchased the dBASE II technology and copyright from Ratliff and he joined Ashton-Tate as vice president of new technology. Ratliff was the project manager
for dBASE III, as well as designer and lead programmer.
The program was renamed dBASE II because they knew that version 1 wouldn't sell. It originally ran on a CP/M computer and then was moved over to the IBM PC.
Note there was never anyone named Ashton, it sounded better. Ashton was a maccaw (parrot) that was the unofficial mascot of Ashton-Tate."