Jet Propulsion Laboratory Display Information System: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 23:34, 8 May 2007

Revision as of 23:45, 10 August 2007

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In the mid-1960's, the [[Jet Propulsion Laboratory]] (JPL) of the [[California Institute of Technology]] (CalTech) was using an IBM product named RETRIEVE. For reasons lost to history, in the late 60’s Jeb Long, a new programmer at JPL, was assigned the task of writing a program which would perform the same functions as RETRIEVE.

By 1973 the program had evolved into a file management program called JPLDIS (Jet Propulsion Laboratory DisplayDatabase-management and Information-retrival System) written in [[Fortran|FORTRAN]], running on a [[UNIVAC 1108]] mainframe.

In 1978, while at JPL, [[Wayne Ratliff]] wrote a database program in assembly language for [[CP/M]] based microcomputers to help him win the football pool at the office. He based it on Jeb Long's JPLDIS and called it Vulcan, after Mr. Spock of Star Trek.