> I'll bite. Of all the things that could be an affront to IBM, why did you > pick AIM? AIM - Advanced Information Manager - was the DBMS Fj developed for their > own OS (X8) and then ported to their MVS clone (F4). > > IIRC it was a network data base, not heirarchical like IMS, not relational > like DB2 (although later there was an AIM-RDB), and so probably not copied from anything > IBMish at all. > > Unless you do mean AIM-RDB, which I wouldn't know if it was DB2-like or > not.
AIM-RDB was indeed "DB2-like" at least from a programming point of view, but it was a lot less functionally rich, which made the "A" in AIM a little ironic. At the time a lot of the FJ product names were prefixed with "A". It's fair to say AIM itself was IMS-ish. I worked for some time as a consultant for FJ at FAI Insurance doing a conversion/migration from the AIM database to AIM-RDB. It was an incredibly painful exercise, not least because there was no real data integrity in either DBMS. The application had to provide data integrity with application logic. You can just imagine how well that went, so a major part of the effort was spent in cleaning up and reconciling all of the dangling references and dead data in the original AIM database. The other part was solving a severe deadlock problem in AIM-RDB. I wrote some software to do deadlock detection and analysis. FJ snarfed it up and added it to their own product without so much as a by-your-leave. That work was later immortalized in the reference to "RYO ALC mods stuffed into the Bamboo OS" in an infamous Ken Dubbo post. CC ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
