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

[David Froble]

JF Mezei wrote:
> 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.

Even earlier.  Back in 1974 on PDP-11s the company I was with was 
developing interactive applications that, as far as I know, was a 
pioneer with such.  No tape files, everything on the oh so very small disks.

We also had developed a database product to support out applications. 
Before there was a RMS, and at least on PDP-11s, RMS never came close to 
ours in performance.  One of my rather unhappy days was the day the boss 
told me "we're not in the database business".  Looking back, it was 
probably the right decision, at least in the DEC world.  We lost sales 
because our products were not "RMS based".  Yes, there was that type of 
prejudice.  I doubt Oracle would have done any better if their world was 
only DEC systems.  What helped them was providing a real need on systems 
that didn't have something like RMS.