dBASE III was the first release written in the C programming language to make it easier to support and port to other platforms. To facilitate the rewrite, an automatic conversion program was used to convert the original Vulcan code from CP/M Z-80 and DOS 8088 assembly language code into C, which resulted in the beginnings of a difficult to maintain legacy code base that would haunt the company for many years to come. This also had the side effect of making the program run somewhat slower, which was of some concern when it first shipped. As newer machines came out the problem was erased through increased performance of the hardware, and the "problem" simply went away.