Ask HN: What Historically Is Oracle VAX Rdb/VMS?

6 pointsjaxrtech3y ago3 comments

Hey HN,

In conversation, I heard that Oracle had a version of their database that historically ran on the VAX system:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Rdb

I've never heard of this before (and have tried do a decent bit of historical research in general). Would be interesting if anyone else had practical experience or historical knowledge about it? How does it compare to what is modern Oracle?

I try to explore a lot of historical hardware and operating systems in my spare time. (You know when you are back for the holidays you get to hear all kinds of great old stories...)

3 comments

lproven3y ago

RDB was the built-in database in DEC VAX/VMS. Oracle bought it from them when DEC was selling off its assets, while DEC was busily going broke from the misguided effort to develop the VAX 9000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Rdb

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX_9000

DEC was in the process of slowly imploding. The lead OS engineer, Dave Cutler, had already left to go to Microsoft with his team, where he took the skeletal outline "OS/2 3" project to make a portable OS/2, and turned it into OS/2 NT and thence Windows NT.

thorin3y ago

I used Oracle on VMS at British Gas around 20+ years ago. I couldn't believe they were still using it to be honest. I'd generally used UNIX SUNs etc up to that point for servers. The main thing I remember was that the shell seemed weird coming from bash and cmd and even navigating around files felt weird at first. British Gas had all sorts of things that were very old at that time. I remember looking at a lot of Basic and Fortran programs.

[edit] I don't remember using Oracle itself being massively different, I think it was probably v7.3.

cafard3y ago

Back about 1990, Oracle would take out a two-page ad in Computerworld, depicting all the computers that it ran on--I suppose mostly minis and mainframes. I'm sure that VAXen were among them.

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