Slashdot Mirror

The first Lunar Lander was written for the CDC6400 around 1965 and used both console high-speed vector displays. It was amusing enough as a video game but to actually land without running out of fuel required some knowledge of physics. Can't find any images of it, but from this link :

The 6600 featured parallel functional units and used 10 peripheral processors (PPUs) for distributed processing. It sported the fastest clock speed for its day (100 nanoseconds). The 6600 was the first commercial computer to use a CRT console; CRTs and radar screens had been used on earlier machines. CDC checkout engineers created computer games such as Baseball, Lunar Lander, and Space Wars, which became incentives for getting the machines operational. These are thought to be the first computer games that used monitors.

• FTP
• Telnet
• FTP mail (which predated SMTP)
• UUCP
• Kermit
• IBM IMS
• INGRES
• the original MUD
• MRDS

• Maybe you should just read A Brief History of the Internet which lists FTP, email, telnet, NCP, TCP, UUCP, and BITNET gateways as being developed and in production before MS-DOS was released in 1982.

  CBBS was a dial-in BBS (think web forum without the WWW, HTTP, browser, or pretense) in 1978 on CP/M.

  IBM had terminals connecting to remote servers -- a serious precursor to proper client/server -- in 1964. The first ATM -- clearly a client-server technology -- was installed in 1970. Usenet was invented in 1979. Essex MUD was in 1979. Ask the Computer History Museum about networking.

  Creeper traversed networks in 1971. Wikipedia calls it a virus, but the description they give is more of a worm. It ran on TENEX and infected systems over ARPANET.

  In 1971, RFC 189 described a method and system for submitting jobs to a mainframe from remote systems over ARAPANET and to receive the results. It includes the connections, protocols, the mapping of ASCII to EBCDIC for systems that used ASCII to not need to translate on their end, a name for the whole thing (NETRJS), and several details of implementation.

  Need any more examples?

  Why yes, yes, computer history is a hobby of mine.

Interbase/Firebird also supported some other language ... GDML, was it? Documentation

As I recall, it's all but impossible to get to anymore. As for multiple languages in the same engine, the SQL support has multiple dialects available, with slightly different support for certain datatypes (particularly date/time-related.) So there's a bit of that already, though not tons.

Business system 12 for an example of yet another language in early systems.

I'd like to put a vote up for relational databases... Relational Databases before they were cool!

The Alphora Dataphor DAE is the first relational database management system since IBM BS12 and the QUEL version of Postgres.

It was coded for MS .Net, thus it should be readily portable to Ximian Mono or GNUs & Southern Storms DotGNU Portable.Net.

If such a potentially useful software became publicized and free software, we could have a really innovating no Marketspeak intended , probably killer application the proprietary vendors would have a hard time scrambling after.

And that with unreprochable theoretical foundations attested by the luminars of the field.

> I meant "street relational", not Codd theory-book relational.

The problem is that street relational is no relational at all, since it violates the basic theoretical principles of the relational model. BTW it’s not only Codd, but also Christopher J Date, Hugh Darwen, Fabian Pascal and now Nathan Allan.

It makes no sense to speak about Codd theory-book relational. There is a post-Euclidian Math with is still Mathematics, and indeed superseeds Euclid; but it evolves from the Euclidian fundamentals to the point of redefining them. SQL, OODBMSs and other database models up to this day are either pre-relational or just plain confusion of mind which seems works just because people never considered they could have something much better &ndash -- that they could have had it for twenty years already.

> But DB2 is generally *relational*, not OO.

IBM DB2 is SQL. While SQL claims to be relational, it isn’t. There are only two faithful implementations of the relational model, one is obsolete, the other is still a beta.

> A valid point, and I may read some more of the articles on the site.

Please do. You may also be interested in some stuff at DMoz Relational Implementations and Model listings... I created these, they have been taken over with no explanations and I could never get back into DMoz, again with now explanations as to why.

> But I'm not likely to buy books merely to understand an argument which appears dubious and impractical.

‘Dubious and impractical’ in which grounds? In fact, it’s hardly dubious because they are the authors and maintainers of the relational model; and it’s not impractical at all because there were already at least two faithful implementations of the relational model already, one currently in beta and other in production usage for twenty years already, not to mention other implementations, partial or not that aren’t perfect but are still more faithful to the model.

> It seems that the core issue is the authors' demand to define 'relational database' in a sense that predates SQL and ignores all recent evolution.

The whole point is that SQL is an involution.

> Has anyone written a true relational database? If not, what are they waiting for? Is such a database vastly harder to write than the pseudo-relational databases being used today?

Yes, as I pointed above. The issue here is that the market has in the eighties taken the ‘safe’ option (IBM SQL/DS) and fell in love with it over the better alternatives, just as it did with MS Windows over Unix and OS/2 in the nineties.

> Sounds like another collision between reality and ideal. In an ideal world, the structure and business model of a company would be known in advance and someone would create a unified data model for the company. In practice, large companies purchase many different software packages that come with their own database schema.

Again that’s a failure in the tools and processes. Even if SQL is fundamentally flawed, if it was really standard integrating all these databases wouldn't be so hard; if it was really distributed it would be a given; if on top of this all these products were properly documented, this job would be almost done already.

> A valid point, and I may read some more of the articles on the site.

Please do. You may also be interested in some stuff at DMoz Relational Implementations and Model listings... I created these, they have been taken over with no explanations and I could never get back into DMoz, again with now explanations as to why.

> But I'm not likely to buy books merely to understand an argument which appears dubious and impractical.

‘Dubious and impractical’ in which grounds? In fact, it’s hardly dubious because they are the authors and maintainers of the relational model; and it’s not impractical at all because there were already at least two faithful implementations of the relational model already, one currently in beta and other in production usage for twenty years already, not to mention other implementations, partial or not that aren’t perfect but are still more faithful to the model.

> It seems that the core issue is the authors' demand to define 'relational database' in a sense that predates SQL and ignores all recent evolution.

The whole point is that SQL is an involution.

> Has anyone written a true relational database? If not, what are they waiting for? Is such a database vastly harder to write than the pseudo-relational databases being used today?

Yes, as I pointed above. The issue here is that the market has in the eighties taken the ‘safe’ option (IBM SQL/DS) and fell in love with it over the better alternatives, just as it did with MS Windows over Unix and OS/2 in the nineties.

> Sounds like another collision between reality and ideal. In an ideal world, the structure and business model of a company would be known in advance and someone would create a unified data model for the company. In practice, large companies purchase many different software packages that come with their own database schema.

Again that’s a failure in the tools and processes. Even if SQL is fundamentally flawed, if it was really standard integrating all these databases wouldn't be so hard; if it was really distributed it would be a given; if on top of this all these products were properly documented, this job would be almost done already.

> can't remember if the proper name for the original mk was Mica or Prism

Microsoft oriented press usually have little regard for jornalistic quality standards, but as far as I remember this article is correct: Prism was the hardware, Mica the OS for Digital’s ‘future system’ that failed, prompting Cutler to go work at Microsoft. Interesting that these ‘future systems’ have a tendency of going seriously wrong: IBM’s gave us SQL instead of relational, and that is worse than Windows!.

> can't remember if the proper name for the original mk was Mica or Prism

Microsoft oriented press usually have little regard for jornalistic quality standards, but as far as I remember this article is correct: Prism was the hardware, Mica the OS for Digital’s ‘future system’ that failed, prompting Cutler to go work at Microsoft. Interesting that these ‘future systems’ have a tendency of going seriously wrong: IBM’s gave us SQL instead of relational, and that is worse than Windows!.

Historically the US companies get the last say on standards and product acceptance. IBM UK had the far superior BS12 relational system, but IBM US got the substandard SQL accepted instead; Symbian from Europe has had the Psion in widespread use much before Palm's success in the US, but Psion has been cancelled in the end-user market (only cell phones now) and even them Microsoft is pushing WinCE and will probably succeed in the long run if GNU/Linux don't get there first.

Even if components are manufactured in the Far East, it is big integrators like Acer, Toshiba and the like, specially the US ones IBM, Dell, HP, Compaq, that get to set standards set by US monopolists Microsoft and Intel. And US law is also the standard for international law and treaties, as well as the template for other countries -- witness DMCA, copyright extensions and the like.

As for the Be case, I mentioned it because it shows how much power US companies have to shut down competitors' access to entire market segments. It is an example from the much more closed Apple market space, but the PC market is becoming more and more like that.

> relational databases will be around for a long time to come

That is, whenever they arrive they will be around for a long time. Up to now I know of no fully relational database or DBMS, apart from BS12 and perhaps Quel and Leap.

> it's clear that no automated solution exists that will optimize performance in every case

Performance is not the only issue, not even the biggest one: data access path independence and data integrity are bigger ones, and more fundamental.

The problem is that up to this day no one fully implemented relational theory in a modern system, nor proposed a better theory than the relational one.