♣12♣A Short History of Modern Database Systems
Before we dive into extracting data and modelling, it is worth spending a few minutes to understand how the data is stored. There are many data storage systems available and most are in use. Many companies started investing in computers in the late 1950s or in the 1960s. IBM was an important player in the market of electronic computers and software and developed a particular useful computer language in the 1950s: FORTRAN. FORTRAN became soon the software of choice for many companies. Later developments allowed for structured programming (in a nutshell this is less using the
goto lineNbr command and more use constructs such as
if,
for, etc.) 1
Many large companies have since been building on their code and adding functionality. This means that some code is about retirement age (60 years old). 2
Fortran outlived the punched cards, the tape readers and also encountered the navigational database management systems (DBMS) in the 1960s. In the age of tapes, any data was simply a list of things. It is at the advent of the disk and drum readers that “random access” 3 to data became possible and that the term “database” came in use. The technologies fromthe 1960s were a leap ahead and allowed more complex data and more relations between data to be stored and accessed.
As the number of computers, computer users and applications grew faster and faster, it can of course be expected ...
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