Re: Pre-relational, post-relational, 1968 CODASYL "Survey of Data Base Systems"

"Dawn M. Wolthuis" <dwolt_at_tincat-group.com> wrote in message news:c6htqr$mcr$1_at_news.netins.net...
> "Ken North" <knorth2_at_deletethis.yahoo.com> wrote in message
>
> Was COBOL still part of that?

COBOL was in the database picture, but not the GIM picture, at that time.

Products such as GIM and IBM's GIS were created to be a general purpose, standalone, information retrieval appliance. They were intended to be easy enough for non-technical people to use.

IBM, CODASYL and other influences had also come along with the idea of extending traditional application programming languages, such as COBOL, to be able to operate with databases. So one of the questions used to evaluate a DBMS in the early '70s was whether it had an HOL (higher-order language interface).

The lab at TRW responsible for GIM also worked with other DBMS products. It had people creating applications using GIM (no COBOL, FORTRAN, or PL/I interface). It also had people working on applications using IBM IMS databases and COBOL. There was some System 2000 work. There were also lots of FORTRAN projects but they didn't tend to use a DBMS at that time. Received on Tue Apr 27 2004 - 08:27:06 CEST