Gee, I thought he was asking me...

For what it's worth, I was with DEC in the Galaxy group from late 1978 to late 1980. I worked on the File Finder project, which was an online database to keep track of backup tapes and the contents therein.

So if you zorched a file and wanted to restore it, you'd run File Finder and find out what tape (or tapes) it was on and away you went. An earlier version had been written in COBOL, which was using fixed length records that were scanned sequentially. It rapidly blew up disk space as well as having order O(N) CPU usage.

We got as far as designing a b-tree structured database, partly because of the discovery process involved but mostly because we were given some very poor implementation restrictions. It's too bad; it could have easily been integrated into Galaxy, so once you found what you wanted, you could get the mount request in and trigger the archive system's restore process, which would have been very seamless. These days, that kind of functionality is found everywhere (Veritas, Time Machine, Etc.)

I can't remember my badge number, but I still have it. Somewhere... I can' barely remember what building I was in Marlboro. I think #3? (the one on the right hand side closest to manufacturing and the upper parking lot). I do remember the Galaxy group's machine, 2116 ("The Big Orange Welcomes You") and, oddly enough, my sign-on id, "DEBELLIS" :-)

On 3/12/23 10:56 AM, Robert Armstrong wrote:

  I quit in 1985.  Badge number 147367 (still have it memorized :)

Bob
Johnny Billquist <bqt@softjar.se> wrote:
When were you at DEC?