5 ms·

I find it odd that there is no mention of RMS, the userspace filesystem view on VMS. It supported sequential, block (a.k.a. "relative") and indexed files; seque

by m3047 3y ago

I find it odd that there is no mention of RMS, the userspace filesystem view on VMS. It supported sequential, block (a.k.a. "relative") and indexed files; sequential output (the DCL command was TYPE rather than cat or more) was transparent (i.e. indexed file output was in primary key order). This was done at the file system level. TLDR: The VMS file system supported key/value storage off the shelf (with multiple key views!). I accidentally crashed a production VAX from userspace via an unaligned disk read on a unibus compatibility driver (they were also using the disk they assigned me for testing for swap; virtual memory machines don't run so well when the swap drive bug checks and goes offline) while developing a RSTS block I/O emulator. I later had a small consulting gig writing a USB driver for NT. The people who hired me said that because I had experience with VMS drivers I'd be able to do it; not knowing different I said "ok" and I guess they were right.

sillywalk 3y ago
Some kind of built-in records/database stuff in the filesystem seemed to be common for mini-computers (and mainframes). Like you mentioned, DEC had RMS(record management systems). IBM System/38 & AS/400 had a built in DB2, and I believe System/36 had something similar. HP 3000's MPE had records in the filesystem I think (it also came with the TurboImage database, though I think that was on top of the MPE filesystem) Tandem Guardian had Enscribe.
- m3047 3y ago
  Along with RDB (DEC's SQL DB implementation) and DBMS-32 (DEC's CODASYL implementation), the CDD ("Common Data Dictionary") was built on top of the KODA engine. CDD wasn't really free with the operating system, but it was ubiquitous. I spent some time hacking on that too for the report wizard people. I concur, the notion of "an army marches on its data" was an intrinsic in those environments. It also extended to related technologies such as networking, messaging, lambdas (DECNet Network Objects), and [edit: distributed, cluster-wide] locking. Obviously there are echos of this in today's cloud and other tightly integrated offerings. You might not agree with the entirety of the vendor implementation, but there was undeniably one to disagree with. The report wizard people competed directly with Datatrieve, along with being bundled with for instance a large ERP package.

by m3047 3y ago

sillywalk 3y ago

Some kind of built-in records/database stuff in the filesystem seemed to be common for mini-computers (and mainframes). Like you mentioned, DEC had RMS(record management systems). IBM System/38 & AS/400 had a built in DB2, and I believe System/36 had something similar. HP 3000's MPE had records in the filesystem I think (it also came with the TurboImage database, though I think that was on top of the MPE filesystem) Tandem Guardian had Enscribe.

m3047 3y ago
Along with RDB (DEC's SQL DB implementation) and DBMS-32 (DEC's CODASYL implementation), the CDD ("Common Data Dictionary") was built on top of the KODA engine. CDD wasn't really free with the operating system, but it was ubiquitous. I spent some time hacking on that too for the report wizard people. I concur, the notion of "an army marches on its data" was an intrinsic in those environments. It also extended to related technologies such as networking, messaging, lambdas (DECNet Network Objects), and [edit: distributed, cluster-wide] locking. Obviously there are echos of this in today's cloud and other tightly integrated offerings. You might not agree with the entirety of the vendor implementation, but there was undeniably one to disagree with. The report wizard people competed directly with Datatrieve, along with being bundled with for instance a large ERP package.