"A veritable bucket of facts" origins of the data base management system

Abstract

The data base concept derives from early military on-line systems, and was not originally associated with the specific technologies of modern data base management systems. While the idea of an integrated data base, or "bucket of facts," spread into corporate data processing and management circles during the early 1960s, it was seldom realized in practice. File-processing packages were among the very first distributed as supported products, but only in the late 1960s were they first called "data base management systems," in large part through the actions of the Data Base Task Group of the Committee on Data Systems Languages (CODASYL). As the DBMS concept spread, the data base itself was effectively redefined as the informational content of a packaged DBMS. Throughout the process, managerial descriptions of the data base as a flexible and integrated repository for all corporate data stood in sharp contrast with the useful but limited nature of actual systems.