[Info-vax] OpenVMS x86-64 and RDB and DB's in general on OpenVMS

[JF Mezei]

On 15-06-28 13:49, Jan-Erik Soderholm wrote:

> And, as Davis asked, how did VMS manage to grow before 1984?
> Probably in the same way as all other platforms lacking DB2,
> Oracle, Sybase or whatever, grow. But that was another time...


1983, Readers Digest in Canada stored its spam/client database as
sequential files ON TAPES.  Disks were still too expensive to store
large amounts of data but the move to disk based data had already begun.

So the concept of a "database" was foreign since the data was not random
access YET.

In fact, DEC customers were generally ahead of IBM customers in moving
off punched cards, and tapes as VAX and PDP11s were built to be more
interactive. (but also likely becauyse DEC customers didn't have the
huge data files that IBM customers would have, so it was easier to store
data on disk.