In the 1970s the first commercial applications were built to computerize the day-to-day operations of a business. These systems were built on mainframe computers which were very expensive. Only large businesses could afford the hardware, the programmers to program them, and the operations staff to keep them running. These systems were focused on inserting new data and reading it sequentially using magnetic tapes.
With the invention of disk storage, the data could be accessed directly. This led to the first database management systems, which organized the data either hierarchically or in a network. These database systems were very complex. Programmers had to understand how the data was stored on the disk and navigate through the data to generate reports. Application programmers used COBOL to create custom reports. It took several days or even weeks to write the program for each new report. Reports were printed on computer paper and manually distributed to the users. There were never enough programmers, so there was always an application backlog. Once data could be accessed directly, the first on-line transaction processing (OLTP) systems were built.
Last Updated ( Friday, 15 August 2008 07:22 )
Read more...
Yogyakarta Time
