DMSII or DMSii?

[Frank Clarijs]

Some (more senior) colleagues remember that the II in DMSII originally
had a meaning different from the Roman number 2. The "ii" was an
abbreviation of some sort. Can anyone help us remembering what ii stood for?

Frank

[Alan Ponting]

"Frank Clarijs" <frank....@nospam.unisys.com> wrote in message
news:elodip$2itj$1...@si05.rsvl.unisys.com...

I always thought it was DMS version 2 ??
Alan Ponting

[khe...@webmail.co.za]

The way I heard the story was that the II was to make DMSII's name
unique as IBM already had DMS as a product for their OS.

Regards
Karl Heinze

[Marc Wilson]

In comp.sys.unisys, (khe...@webmail.co.za) wrote in
<1166091953.9...@j72g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>::

There was also DMS for the 1100, of course- I don't think anyone would be
too worried about "DMS" as a product name, it's an obvious generic name.

I heard a story that a senior executive saw "DMS II" and misread it as "DMS
11", so the next version had to be "DMS 12". Anyone know if it's true?
--
Marc Wilson

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[Chas]

The "II" actually does mean second-try. Prior to DMSII there was
DM6700.

Charles

[Ian Dalziel]

On Thu, 14 Dec 2006 10:41:01 +0000, Marc Wilson <ma...@cleopatra.co.uk>
wrote:

>I heard a story that a senior executive saw "DMS II" and misread it as "DMS
>11", so the next version had to be "DMS 12". Anyone know if it's true?

That happened the other way round with LINC - LINC 11, following LINC
10, was marketed as "LINC Two".

--

Ian D

[Marc Wilson]

In comp.sys.unisys, (Ian Dalziel) wrote in
<g343o25p79e3g939u...@4ax.com>::

Ah- that's probably what I'm remembering. Getting on a bit, doncha know?

[Colin Zealley]

I suspect this may be confusion between DMS and LINC - remember that level
11 of LINC became known as LINC II, with the introduction of the interactive
development system.

Not that I'd know, I'm a Sperroid ...

Cheers
Colin

"Frank Clarijs" <frank....@nospam.unisys.com> wrote in message
news:elodip$2itj$1...@si05.rsvl.unisys.com...

[Ian Dalziel]

On Fri, 15 Dec 2006 07:43:06 -0000, "Colin Zealley"
<colin....@removethisbit.unisys.com> wrote:

>I suspect this may be confusion between DMS and LINC - remember that level
>11 of LINC became known as LINC II, with the introduction of the interactive
>development system.

Is anyone else getting an echo in here?
;-)

--

Ian D

[Colin Zealley]

Well, Ian, I only saw your response after I'd posted ... :-)

Cheers
Colin

"Ian Dalziel" <ianda...@lineone.net> wrote in message
news:3uj5o2165f651ovs2...@4ax.com...

[George Dickson]

The story I heard a long time ago from one of the original developers
was that it was a marketing decision to imply that it was a new improved
version.

George.

[Louis Krupp]

Which it was. As a previous poster noted, DMSII was a successor to DM6700.

What I remember hearing -- some 30 years ago -- is that DMSII introduced
DMALGOL and the preprocessor stuff in the Access Routines. Schema
changes could take forever, but things went faster at run-time because
per-table parameters (like record size and key size) had been compiled
in and the Access Routines didn't need to look stuff up in tables.

Louis

[roro]

Hello Frank,

As I can remember DMSII was meant to be a major new version, and this is why
it was labeled with the roman "II". The "ii" either came from people with
old teletype keyboards who did not have capital letters or from people who
did not understand what roman numbering like "II" was about.

Have fun,

Robert

"George Dickson" <george.do...@unisys.dot.com> wrote in message
news:ep78mh$12sd$1...@si05.rsvl.unisys.com...

[richardmullins]

I attended the first DMSII course at La Habra in Los Angeles in November 1973. The course was run by Barbara Nordberg. Attendees includes James Harley and Tom Olle. Kathy Rodgers was in the office at Proctor Street, Mission of Industry. DMSII was also called BDMS. Burroughs had an earlier product called DMSI. I presumed that DMSI was inspired by IBM's IMS.

Richard Mullins
nrmu...@internode.on.net

[richardmullins]

DMSII - first training course was held in November 1973. At the time, BDMS was used by the course teacher, and the manual, as an alternative name. DMSI was an earlier Burroughs database system, no doubt fairly similar. Like IBM's IMS, DMSI was "interpreted at run time". There was also a DMSII utility program called DMSIIINTERPRETER or something similar, which allowed run time interpretation.
I got to go on the DMSII course because Franck Marschall was asking for a raise, and to punish him, they sent me to the course instead of him.

Richard Mullins

[Paul Kimpel]

Jim Harley -- now there's a name I haven't heard in a while.

Your post appears to reply to a thread from 2006, but just to recap,
it's DMSII, or sometimes DMS II. I've never seen it written with the
Roman numerals in lower-case. These days its official name is Enterprise
Database Server for ClearPath MCP, which is why everyone outside of
Marketing still calls it DMSII. I've also never heard it called BDMS,
although some components had that as a name prefix, e.g., BDMSALGOL,
BDMSCOBOL.

The earlier product was called DM6700. It was created by the
applications group in Detroit (MSDD?), which later moved to, I think,
Irvine, California. It was not a bad product, but the performance was
not that great, and the reliability -- especially in terms of data
integrity -- needed to be improved. The job was handed to the B6700
Engineering group, located at that time on Proctor Avenue in City of
Industry, CA, where the design was led by Dave Dahm and Roy Guck.

I never heard DM6700 called DMSI, except perhaps in retrospect. DMSII
was significantly better than DM6700 is almost all respects, and the use
of DM6700 quickly died out after DMSII became available.

IBM's IMS existed before DM6700 (as far back as 1966), and the people at
Burroughs had to be aware of its features and capabilities, but IMS,
DM6700, and DMSII are all hierarchical/network database models, and are
descended from the work of the Codasyl Data Base Task Group in the mid
'60s through early '70s. That model uses a somewhat file/record-oriented
approach to data structure definition and manipulation, and it fit well
with the traditional data processing concepts and techniques that were
predominant at the time.

I don't think that DM6700 or DMSII were inspired by IMS in any technical
sense. What inspired them was the rise of on-line systems and much more
tightly-integrated application designs. There was a real need for schema
control, conflict resolution (locking), and most of all, audit and
recovery in case of system or storage outages. Batch systems did not
have access conflicts and were easy to recover -- you just saved some
past set of master and transaction files, and reran them. With on-line
systems, transactions often came in parallel, you got one chance to
capture them, and the consequences of dropping a transaction afterwards
could be severe.

Data Base Management Systems were a hot topic in the late '60s and early
'70s -- everyone was doing them. The hierarchical/network data model was
not in prominence for longm of course. As the performance of DMBS
systems based on relational models and SQL improved through the '70s and
'80s, their use swamped that of the older model.

1973 sounds a little early to me for a DMSII class. I worked on the
DMSII field test at Burroughs in 1974. I remember going to City of
Industry in the Spring of 1974 for a TOI (Transfer of Information) being
held for the field people to learn about the product. I don't think
DMSII was officially released until late 1974 or sometime in 1975. I
doubt that a class for users could have been held before that TOI.

In your second post you mention DMSIIINTERPRETER. I think you are
thinking of DMINQUIRY and DMINTERPRETER. DMINQUIRY is (it's still
around) an interactive program for ad hoc query and update of a DMSII
database. DMINTERPRETER is the same engine, but is packaged as an API
that programs can call to do the same types of operations. They are
compiled from the same source. Those programs were not available with
the first release of DMSII. I think it was the better part of a year
before either DMINQUIRY became available, and I think DMINTERPRETER came
out sometime after that.

--
Paul

[richardmullins]

Paul, I was interested to read your post. I looked at DMINQUIRY at the end of 1976 when I had a temporary job at CCAE computer centre. I looked at it again in 1990 and it seemed to have more features. I don't remember looking at DMINTERPRETER until 1990 and presume I must have called it from LINC (i.e. LINC-generated Cobol).
I thought DMINTERPRETER was very good but did not use it much. In 1995 I was at a site in Roseville MN and saw the Donald Gregory publications for the first time - this was probably similar in depth to a study of the source code).

I even remember being asked to write some ideas in 1977 in response to a a request for suggestions from Jim Hughes, the Burroughs representative who visited CCAE. I wrote that I thought that an interpreter would be a good idea. (This was a heretical idea, perhaps, given that the accessroutines were "pre compiled").

However there is only a small chance that the idea for a dmsii interpreter came from me. There would have any number of users who might have made such a suggestion.


The course I went to ran for 5 days in early November 1973 at La Habra - it was at a hotel or a motel. There might have 15 people in the class, including from France, Mexico, Germany, South Africa. Kathy Rogers worked in the office at the huge Burroughs site in Proctor Street City of Industry.

You wrote: "1973 sounds a little early to me for a DMSII class. I worked on the

DMSII field test at Burroughs in 1974. I remember going to City of
Industry in the Spring of 1974 for a TOI (Transfer of Information) being
held for the field people to learn about the product. I don't think
DMSII was officially released until late 1974 or sometime in 1975. I
doubt that a class for users could have been held before that TOI".

Of course DMSII was not officially released when I did the course. It was in "beta testing" in early 1974. I used Cobol/DMSII to write code for a large tender in November 1973.
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