Re: pro- foreign key propaganda?

David Cressey wrote:
...
> Your guess is as good as mine, maybe better. But my guess is different.
>
> I believe the word "key" was as unhooked from "address" as any term of the
> day.
> I don't know a thing about IMS. For several indexed file systems, the keys
> were fraught with navigational consequences, but this was *not* because
> they were something other than data. The keys were just as much data as
> they were in the 1970 paper.
> ...

In the 1980's there was a product called Model204 with military origins.

    It had a feature called 'invisible keys' or somesuch. The idea was that if a (dense) index already contained all key values, why bother storing them again them as 'data'? I remember the telephone books of that time, thinking that they could be made thinner by implementing the same idea. Talked about patenting it, never did and a few years later most 'phone companies adopted it. I hope whoever made it happen got paid for the idea! Received on Wed May 21 2008 - 00:50:12 CEST