November 19, 2008
Did I indulge in a bit of hyperbole when writing the headline for this article about the 40th anniversary of IMS? According to consultant and author Ken North (who wrote our cover story on XML, by the way), I did. Here's an excerpt from his note to me:
"IMS and 1968 are not the beginning of the DBMS. In fact, there was a survey of existing DBMS software published in 1968 by the CODASYL (Committee on Data Systems Languages). CODASYL developed COBOL (a 1960 standard) and the CODASYL Data Base Task Group (DBTG) created the standard for the network model database, often called the CODASYL model database...
Here is a September 3, 1968 survey that was distributed by the CODASYL Systems Committee.
You can see the survey includes IBM CICS, IMS and ICS (the product that was re-named IMS). But there are others that preceded the development of IMS, including IBM GIS. My boss in 1968 had participated in the 1966 field test of IBM GIS at Royal Dutch Shell (Shell Oil) in Venezuela."
So, if IMS wasn't first, what does hold the distinction as the first DBMS?
On a tangentially related topic, see this article about moon-dust data from the Apollo 11, 12, and 14 missions. (IMS was developed to handle the bill of materials for Apollo spacecraft.) Researchers are trying to retrieve the data using an "ancient" tape drive donated by a museum. Raises lots of interesting questions about data storage and retrieval over long periods of time.
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