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Admin
I just have to say something to the youngsters who think that the RDBMS was invented just recently. (Gee, and I thought I was young...)
I took my first programming job in 1993, working with Oracle on SunOS (no Solaris yet guys), and I can assure you that relational databases were quite mature, even at that "early" stage. IIRC I was using version 6.
Of course M$ seems to have pulled the wool over a lot of the kiddies eyes by naming their RDBMS SQL Server, like it's the only SQL implementation out there...
Admin
The product name is "Microsoft SQL Server" and it is, in fact, the only SQL server made by Microsoft. Your point being?
I suppose they could have given it some goofy dot-com era name like "Microsoft Storzo" but then they'd have to spend money to tell people what "Storzo" is.
Admin
Many people have been puzzled my the machine specifications. and time frame.
This was early to mid 1999. WIN98 had been out a while. I have no idea why the "main" machine was running what appeared to be unpatched WIN95.
As for the "new" machine, it get's better. The company had just hired some more office space, and the new office came with a "free" computer.
I was never sure whether it was left behind by the last tenant, or fell out of the building manager's packet of cornflakes.
It therefore was "new" to our company, but so old that Noah only took it on the ark so that the kids had something to play tetris on. It predated AGP by a huge margin. I never gave any thought as to how it had 13Meg.
The "killer app" of the engine was a drill down directory... like google's. Each category was specified by two numbers, and the items in that category were consecutively numbered, an entires number was represented by it's filename... hence the insertion headache. And of course anything in two categories needed two complete records.
Admin
Don't forget Borlands Paradox - my RDBMS of choice circa 1995.
Admin
Okay, so I'm an old school BSD guy who still hasn't forgiven Sun for Solaris.
Admin
I'm not sure they had XML in early 1999. And even if they did, nobody had heard of it yet. Those were the times...
Admin
That only shows how bad it is to establish policies and regulations for everything. Especially for things that are known to change fast.
Admin
Rrriiiight...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Corporation#History
Relational databases and SQL are pretty old inventions, you know...
Admin
Had once a 486 with 9M=24M+4256k.
Admin
In fact, Sybase created "SQL Server" as a UNIX product in 1987. MS (along with Ashton-Tate of dBase fame) partnered with them a year later to make an OS/2 version. It was only when MS wanted to rewrite it for NT using threads and async-I/O that they split up, but they both kept the name. Sybase renamed their product 10 years ago, however, to differentiate it from MS's offering.
Admin
I think the name is very carefully thought up, and MS seems to have been very successful in making 'SQL' and 'MS SQL Server' almost the same thing for many people. Now THAT's a major WTF...
Admin
I worked for Oracle in '93 or so and they had version 6.0 at that time a full relational DB with any feature you could desire at that time (row level locking, synch, rollback, whatever); with version 7 (distributed DB) in it's beta stage.
BTW '95 when Windows 95 Beta was delivered to developers, it's ODBC components did not work as they were placeholders only copied from a NT (!) ditribution; at that time, it took me 2 hours with the Microsoft phone support (costing $10,000 pa) to figure that one out, when I finally was handed over to an expert, telling me, "why, of course ODBC won't work, those are NT Dll's we shipped as placeholders for the right ones to come!" :-/
Admin
I worked for Oracle in '93 or so and they had version 6.0 at that time a full relational DB with any feature you could desire at that time (row level locking, synch, rollback, whatever); with version 7 (distributed DB) in it's beta stage.
BTW '95 when Windows 95 Beta was delivered to developers, it's ODBC components did not work as they were placeholders only copied from a NT (!) ditribution; at that time, it took me 2 hours with the Microsoft phone support (costing $10,000 pa) to figure that one out, when I finally was handed over to an expert, telling me, "why, of course ODBC won't work, those are NT Dll's we shipped as placeholders for the right ones to come!" :-/
Admin
Ingres and Informix were available on Unix and Xenix by 1982, Oracle was not much behind. I wrote a commercial app based on Ingres on a Vax 750 with 256k of RAM in 1982.
Admin
Databases like we have now were in their infancy back then that's for sure. Oracle might've had something, but not sure, as I really didn't/do much database stuff... hmm....
Not sure how to read this, but be aware that when the web went live, databases like we use today existed for more than 20 years, and that is not what I call infancy in IT! OK, there is more possible today, but the database features I used in 1994 for danymic web content generation were not drastically different from what is used today. BTW, good old WAIS helped us indexing everything just fine...
Admin
Even desktop Windows SQL engines were pretty mature by 1996. I fondly remember writing my first SQL queries sometime early 1997 using Sybase SQL Anywhere. It was running rather nicely on an W95/98 with 32Mb of ram, though it behaved much better under NT... all the stuff you'd expect to find in a real "enter<your>price" server where there and running rather smoothly: enforced ref. integrity, transactions/rollbacking, concurrency, stored procedures, a decent query plan optimizer...
There was even a DOS version of this engine that ran under a 32bit extender, historically this was actually a Windows incarnation of good ole Watcom SQL (published as early as 92), which was ultimately bought by Sybase and repackaged as Sybase SQL Anywhere.
Admin
I'd like to point out to those who still think the .com bubble was a failure Zombo.com is still running!
Admin
Re the machine running Win3.11 in 1999, I'm not the least bit surprised.
I work in an IT unit of a very large French bank (some 100 000 employees worldwide). The organization is so rigid, hierarchical and ossified, with counless insane policies for everything and at least 5 people/departments that must be consulted on each and every minorest issue... I feel like pulling my hair out and jumping out the window most of the time.
All the people around me work on fancy dual 3GHz CPU machines with 2G of RAM and at least 3 monitors (some are even cocooning inside mini-igloos made up of 5 or 7 lcd screens)... and all these beasts are running - Windows NT 4.0 from 1996 !!!!
As the most recent joiner I am the only one with a WinXP workstation and am the envy of the department :) now comes some more WTFery: I have French editions of XP and Office, even though I am the only non-native French speaker on the whole floor!!
And all the French native speakers (and by definition English haters) around me are struggling daily with US English installation of Windows :)
Learning to use French Windows is ultimately doable, but the French-speaking Excel is a nightmare. Names and arguments of ALL built-in functions and VBA macros are localized to French, and CSV files sent in by others are basicaly unusable because my Excel uses semicolon as separator and comma is reserved for decimal point.
Admin
It's often a good hint that you are talking to a total idiot if he thinks you are lying about something absolutely mundane.
Admin
Pointy-haired boss foiled again!
Admin
I work at the same bank (I think). I have the same set up. Vive la France!
Admin
"Databases like we have now were in their infancy back then that's for sure."
Rubbish. SQL databases date back the 1970s See "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks", by Dr. Edgar F. Codd, published in June, 1970 in the ACM journal.
Microsoft SQL server version 4 shipped in 1992, and it was very much a real database.
Admin
This is O(n*n) since you might have to move n files for every file you insert (worst case).
Regarding the story. I see no problems. I was a supporter before this and IBM and Fujitsu had some strange configurations. I had an IBM 386 with 7 M *System memory* . This is perfectly possible with brands like IBM that made everything themselves. No standards to consider.
Also I seem to remember that win95 was not released in 95, but later. And this story is *before* the bubble-burst (took a couple of years) so it makes perfectly sense to me. According to wikipedia the dot-com period started in 1997.
I also remember that many people where using 3.11/NT 3.51 a long time after win95 simply because ram was so expensive and win95 could not really run with less than 16 megs (many tried and went insane).
I worked as a supporter in a company in 98 on a win 3.11 machine (and a serial terminal). The fortunate ones had NT 3.51 and the not so fortunate had win95.
I liked this story. TheDailyWTF is all about stories you wish wasn't true.
-Martin
Admin
Wrong. I'm sure I had Win95 in '95.
My notebook had 8 MB and it worked fine with Win95.
Admin
People work in France? I call shenanigans! :D
Admin
Well if you want to talk about old versions of stuff.
Oracle 5.1.17 on VMS 4.6, around 1987. The apps were in SQL*Froms 2. Funny because I just got a call over the weekend from that old group I worked with, he needed a few hints on fixing a problem. They are planning to shut down those apps in the next few months. Currently running on Oracle 9, on OpenVMS Alpha 7.1
Just think, we had Databases, TCP/IP, real security and clustering .... all kinds of things that kids today think M$ invented.
Admin
Well, to tell you the truth, I have never done less actual work than during these almost 3 years I've been living in France.
I am one of those extremely rare few with less than perfect origin (non-French) and less than perfect language skills (2 years ago I couldn't speak a word of French) who has somehow managed to find a relatively well paid steady white collar job (a distant dream for most under 30 French)
This is my 3rd job in France. For the first 2 I thought they were just bad apples, but now I am reading to the writing on the wall: paradoxically, those employers who are willing to hire me are doing so exactly because I can't speak French well!! which qualifies me as a perfect warm body headcount, guaranteed to remain stuck at the bottom of the ladder for years whatever actual competences in his field (IT in my case). Generally I am paid to sit in front of computer, randomly punch on the keyboard, and occasionally fulfill some nearly trivial programming assignment... a docile harmless node at the bottom of the hierarchy chart.
I have actually resigned and am moving out of France in two months... adieu la France, the wine and cheeze are great, but this country's economy badly needs a complete makeover before it could convince even its own expats to come back... not to mention silly little foreigners like me.
Admin
Fantastic - the Philosophical Language of John Wilkins brought into the 20th century and computerised !!
Admin
Excactly!
"many tried and went insane" ;)
-Martin
Admin
You think that's primitive?
That's nothing, I helped to create the first web page, on a clay tablet, with a piece of bamboo reed. Using Borland Cuneiform 0.1
Here's a screen shot.
Hot Porn Click Here=[image]
It was wireless, but very difficult to upgrade with patches after release.
Admin
A lot of people have made mention of Oracle, Paradox, MS SQL Server, Sybase and others but perhaps GoatCheez was referring to FOSS solutions. PostgreSQL only became mature recently and MySQL is still a work in progress (although v5 brings it considerably closer) to the big boys.
Knowing that this company didn't seem to want to make capital investments, licenses for one of the proprietary RDBMS (and the server that hosts on it) probably didn't seem like a Good Idea.
Admin
That makes lot of sense. Why would an Internet search engine company invest in such bottomline-incompatible geek playtoys like DBMS software?? they have probably blown their seed capital on superbowl ads and company logoed ballcaps
Admin
Very cool. Did you have a live cam to the nileometer?
I've heard of other popular sites: plauge.com, sungod.ra, locust.org, etc.
Admin
One comment, your Boss was absolutely right to tell you off for turning your PC off like that in those days, god I remember having to park my hard drive before powering down my old amstrad PC.
Admin
If you think this is very far fetched you've never worked on my project. And we're supposted to be CMMI V.
Admin
It may be, but I've experienced worse.
Admin
I call bullshit. If this is real, it's perhaps the biggest WTF to I've seen hit this site. Period. Just way too absurd, and the facts seem kinda screwy, and the humor seems canned.
I definitely call bullshit.
Admin
Or, psychopathic.
Admin
Or he knows you are lying.
Admin
Aww shucks, I forgot to append sincerely to that post. I was sincere though, I swear. That comment was heartfelt. Don't let this slip make you think I wasn't being sincere. I am ALWAYS sincere.
sincerely,
Richard Nixon
Admin
I just spent today (in April, 2006) debugging a connection between a Zope web app, to a PostgreSQL database, to a FreeBSD gateway server, to... a PDP-11 backend, from which files were downloaded using a Perl-generated Kermit script and processed by piped-together Python scripts.
The files were nicely formatted text, with blocks of columns of three digit numbers - representing arrays of bytes, in octal. There were config files somewhere that said at which offset which data point began, and in which type each was. VAX reals need to be converted, ints are different endian... and apparently the reason the offsets started at 1 was because it was all Fortran-generated. Dates were only given as "number of day within the year", presumably to save space (yes, that leads to problems quickly); and all in all, _it probably managed to be more verbose than XML would have been_.
Not everything used to be better...
Remco
Admin
But seriously, I also had an 8 MB Win95 notebook - it was a TI with a Pentium 100 (I was the envy of everyone with their wimpy Pentium 75s). I eventually maxed out the memory at a whopping 40 MB.
Admin
Well, the reason for it was the data bus width of the RAM. 30-pin SIMMs only had a 16-bit data width, and since the 486 consumed data 32-bits wide, you had to have 2 SIMMs per bank. A 72-pin SIMM has a 32-bit data width, so you only needed one.
The Pentium needed 64 bit wide RAM (or at least the chipsets did), so you had to use 2 72-pin SIMMs to accomplish this.
In the DIMM era, we have 64-bit wide RAM DIMMs, and most chipsets are happy to have a 64-bit wide datapath to RAM. Of course, a lot newer chipsets insist on banking the RAM DIMMs for efficiency (e.g., dual channel DDR SDRAM controllers), so we're back to two DIMMs again.
Admin
Im not sure of the point of your post, but the author of the win95 page on wikipedia seems to agree with me:
"8 mb would be more realistic (but still use considerbly virtual memory with office tasks) ...snip ... optimally with 12 or 16 mb memory"
Same page actually confirms me wrong that win95 came later than 95. I must have confused it with some office realease.
MS has off-by-one errors everywhere, so why not in product names :)
This CAPTCHA is getting to me!
3. try....
Admin
yeah they did ... I did some xml work as a data transport bridge for converting data from different sources into our client product. It actually made sense in this implimentation - we could publish the dtd to anyone who wanted to export data into our system.
This was 1999 - 2000 - before it really became the buzzyness that it is today.
Admin
WTF? They localized a de-facto standardized file format?
(Ok, so I'm not seeing the WTF in the original story---lots of ISO-standard stupidity, but pretty common everywhere.)
Admin
I had a class that used Paradox back in the 94-95 time frame also.
Admin
<snip lots="" of="" remarks="" on="" france="" and="" french="" people="">I'm sorry you had to end up in a big company with employees that look like they work for the government.
But I can assure you that in a reasonnably sized company (in fact, usually the smaller the better, I think), people acutally WORK for a living, instead of waiting for the paycheck to come.
And not everyone in France hates foreigners, far from it.
But I agree with you, some people in France should think about how they would do if they were suddenly paid for the real amount of work they provide... (french administration employees mainly).
I'm sorry you feel that way about our country anyway.
--
Troll, seized by the captcha berserk syndrom
</snip>
Admin
It reminds of how I was told by someone that on a 386DX on MS-DOS I had to be on the root folder ("cd \") before switching off the computer. This was so that the hard disk needle would be over a position with no data, in case someone hit the box, and the needle touched the disk surface. He was told so by a friend.
I think that the person who told me so still believes this to be correct.....
Admin
Actually, the CSV "format" used by Excel is directly dependent upon your regional settings. If you choose semicolon as the system-wide "list separator", that's how fields will be separated. Idem for the choice of decimal point symbol.
If you export a table from Excel as CSV, then change list separator from default "," to ";" (Control Panel -> Regional Settings), the same file can no longer be read by Excel. You have to manually search/replace semicolons, colons and commas to correspond to wha's defined in your current locale.
Of course, nothing prevents me from resetting locale settings from French back to standard, but my workstation is remotely administered and most local settings are reset to company whenever I login... talk about corporate totalitarianism