Re: Exploring DEC Rdb/VMS

"Laconic2" <laconic2_at_comcast.net> wrote in message news:T8OdnXtqgJrViOzcRVn-2Q_at_comcast.com...
>
> If you are curious, you can look at online Documentation for DEC Rdb/VMS at:
> www.oracle.com/rdb and navigate to the online manuals. I am not
> recommending you do this, however, unless your curiosity is insatiable. The
> market for this product is basically capped.

Cool. I'll browse around.

> There are different stories among DEC alumni (formerly called "digits") as
> to the fundamental reason why Rdb was built. Of these stories, there are
> only two I believe: first, to leverage the sale of VAXes (called "VAXen");
> second, because it was COOL!

I go back far enough to have spent a fair bit of time on both BSD on the VAX and VMS, so I certainly know the plural of "vax!" :-) Some of my first actually-useful software work was done on Software Tools on VMS at Lawrence Berkeley Labs. We had a 780. It was about 20 feet long. It had 300 megabyte hard disks the size of washing machines. It had an eight inch boot floppy. It had a dedicated machine room with elevated floor and hardcore A/C; there were phones in the machine room but you couldn't use them because you couldn't hear anything over the fan sounds.

> Oracle was clearly built to be platform independent. The Oracle people
> don't want to lock you into IBM, or HP, or Burroughs, or anyone else. They
> just want to lock you into Oracle. Isn't that wonderful!!?

Heh. I learned this term "commoditize your compliments" and a lot of things make more sense since then.

> Those two orientations inform most, maybe all, of the engineering
> differences between the two products. Learning Oracle helped me understand
> "Relational DBMSes" a whole lot better, just as learning my second OS
> helped me to understand operating systems a whole lot better.

Yeah!

> As the St. Pauli Girl beer commercials say: "you never forget your first
> girl". I guess that applies to General Information Retrieval Languages as
> well!

I learned another acronym recently, "Leaking Underground Storage Tanks." It's a big enviro-hazard database, and it's uniformly referred to by its acronym. :-)

Marshall Received on Sat Oct 16 2004 - 14:47:16 CEST