Re: End of an era...

From: Mark Bole <makbo_at_pacbell.net>
Date: Thu, 18 Aug 2005 00:50:43 GMT
Message-ID: <DXQMe.2458$Z%6.497@newssvr17.news.prodigy.com>

Noons wrote:
> hpuxrac wrote:
>

>>Some pretty good database solutions for that time already were in the
>>marketplace and are still proceeding from IBM.

>
>
> Yes, the mainframes. Ah well, can't win them all...
>
>

>>The theoretical and mathematical foundations behind the relational
>>design model were from Codd and Date.

>
>
> And really took off in the Unix platform. No one would have
> cared about them if they'd stayed in the mainframes.
>

No doubt, the Unix platform enabled a lot of technology that would have been a longer time coming, otherwise. Especially including Oracle. Hey, even MS-DOS 2.0 had an undocumented switch in the CONFIG.SYS file which turned on Unix-style pathanames and command line option syntax.

Way back in the young days of Unix, a fellow graduate student remarked with some cynicism that Unix was very good at providing clever solutions to problems that Unix itself created. I'm not sure if he was talking about "grep" or the ability to treat the lineprinter as just another file in the filesystem... ;-)

I still treasure a copy of the original documentation for the C-shell written by Bill Joy when he was at University of California-Berkeley. Not sure about the "thanks for the fish" reference, though...

-Mark Bole Received on Wed Aug 17 2005 - 19:50:43 CDT