A Veritable Bucket of Facts: Origins of the Data base Management System

The data base management system (DBMS) provides a vital underpinning for most of today’s information systems. Yet com-mercial DBMSs have been geared to the highly structured infor-mation needs of corporate administration rather than the full-text searching and indexing needs of many scientific information systems. Why did DBMS technology take this path, given that many pioneering on-line data base systems were designed for textual information retrieval? The data base concept derives from early military on-line systems. While the idea of an integrated data base, or “bucket of facts, ” spread into corporate data pro-cessing and “systems ” circles during the early 1960s, it was sel-dom realized in practice. The DBMS, however, was an update to an earlier technology: the generalized file-processing system. File-processing packages were among the very first distribute