Re: What are the design criteria for primary keys?

..
>
> Justin Wilson, the Cookin' Cajun! Had a great PBS show at the time.
> Model 204 was an inverted file system database. They never got
> commercial success even with a really great product because their
> biggest customers were CIA and NSA.
>
>>> The CIA rep who kept his sunglasses on indoors remained expressionless.<<
>
> In the Cold War days, those guys did not want a lot of people knowing
> what they used, how big the DBs were or anything else. One of the
> "urban myth" stories about 204 was that a salesman approached the
> Russians about buying the software. The next week, he was drafted and
> sent to the DEW line.
>

Thanks, you're right, it was Justin Wilson.

The CCA people (vendor of M204) used to shake their heads about the CIA problem reports. In those days, some problems had to be accompanied by a printed storage 'dump', many of which were over 1,000 pages long. Apparently the CIA dumps sometimes took weeks to arrive and were pretty stringy because a razor blade had been taken to large portions. Received on Sun Sep 05 2010 - 04:31:32 CEST