I don't think the advent of mult-user RDBMS/SQL broke it. There was a time frame (some years) when client-server apps were all the rage - Visual Basic / Delphi

I don't think the advent of mult-user RDBMS/SQL broke it. There was a time frame (some years) when client-server apps were all the rage - Visual Basic / Delphi / PowerBuilder / Gupta SQL as the front-end tools, talking over a LAN or even sometimes a WAN to back-end databases like Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server, Informix, etc. I've worked on some projects of that type earlier. The technical discussions used to be about things like thin client vs. thick client, database transaction isolation levels, whether to use record locking vs. time-stamping, etc., use of stored procedures and triggers, etc. ... :-)