June 7th marked the 25th anniversary of the launch of IBM’s DB2 database on the MVS operating system.
This InformationWeek article describes how a close knit community of researchers and programmers caused the “accidental birth of an empire”.
At first, relational database was a highly mocked product, halting in its performance compared to the programmed-path systems. Skeptics like John Cullinane, founder of Cullinet Software, once took this reporter aside to instruct him that relational database would never amount to anything compared to his firm’s IDMS product. Last year, relational database represented an $18.6 billion a year market, according to IDC. Ecommerce would be impossible without it.
ITWorldCanada discusses the contributions of the IBM Toronto Lab and the development of DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows.
Tags: db2, db2 luw
June 16th, 2008 at 6:05 am
I didn’t know DB2 was that old (or I was for that matter.)
I remember writing some very simplistic DB2 projects in high school either on some weird Xerox cpm box in grade 8 or on that same cpm box used as a terminal to the PDP11 in the corner.
It never worked. Jeff
July 14th, 2008 at 8:05 pm
Nice try. There was never a version of DB2 for CPM or PDP11.