To save time and bandwidth, can I just point out in one place that we are, of course, aware of Adabas, IMS, IDMS, Pick, Mumps, Nomad, Teradata, UniVerse, Foxpro and many other very fine vintage and not-so-vintage database technologies. Some of us were around when they appeared, some of us have actually used some of them - and we’re well aware that most, probably all, of them are still in use somewhere, probably in business-critical applications.

We also deplore the tendency of IT to re-invent the wheel, blindly; although engineers are frequently reusing ideas with their eyes wide open (no bad idea), even if the marketroids aren’t generally equipped to realise this.

These technologies had their chance at mass-market domination and, for whatever reason, there now often seems to be an opportunity for a new implementation of an old idea.

Re-using ideas in new ways is how the human race moves forwards. And, if every time we mentioned a new technology, we added a boilerplate “of course this idea was first developed by IBM/DEC/NCR/Honeywell/whoever in the 1960s”; well, our articles would start to get predictable.

Sometimes it’s not the novelty of the idea that matters but the novelty (or cost-effectiveness or even the marketing) of the implementation…

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