Mark, as far as I know Ask Same is currentl Windoes only (the FAQ suggested using Virtual PC for a Mac) and I believe Dick's DOS version at any rate is stand alone. The DOS version does have a free (I've a feeling that Dick negotiated with them many year ago) runtime to read the proprietry .ask file but I believe any other distributed version involved either involves works on it's .ask file format or on an ASCII export to get the data into whatever usable format for the program in question.

While it may offer great speed, etc. (and we may disagree), I see all the above as drawbacks compared to an SQL database. My (OK perhaps wrong) feeling is that its use has contributed toward the long time between new releases of the dt.