[TriLUG] UNIVAC 1, DBA

[Jeremy Davis]

Thanks for the feedback! I found some nice artifacts while looking into
some of these questions. Reading up on the evolution of databases was
interesting. I did not see a Linux distro available for the Univac but I
think the code was open source back then. :-)

Jeremy







On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 9:45 PM, Steve Litt <slitt at troubleshooters.com>wrote:

> On Mon, 25 Nov 2013 20:24:14 -0500
> Jeremy Davis <jeremyhwllc at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Hey folks, my Great Aunt, Jean Lewis, was a database administrator
> > with the Census Bureau. She worked with the UNIVAC 1, which was one
> > of the first commercially used computers. She also had some
> > affiliation with Grace Harper.
> >
> > Jean is also the grandmother of my nephew, Joshua, who is very
> > enthusiastic about technology and has attended most TriLUG meetings
> > over the last year with my daughter Kacy and I.
> >
> > I have been thinking it would be cool to have Joshua interview Jean
> > about her experience with the UNIVAC 1 and I will record it then post
> > it to Youtube to share.
> >
> > I thought it would be neat to ask, if anyone on this list has ideas
> > for good questions to ask during the interview?
>
> With only 12KB of RAM, how was the database constructed? Was it
> composed of fixed length sequential files sorted on primary key,
> accessed by binary search? Did they have index files, sorted on a field
> and containing the record number in a fixed length sequential file? How
> did they insert records? Was it in a batch process once a day? I doubt
> a join could be done with 12KB machine, so did they simulate joins
> within the application program?
>
> Thanks,
>
> SteveT
>
> Steve Litt                *  http://www.troubleshooters.com/
> Troubleshooting Training  *  Human Performance
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