Hello everyone! I am sorry if this is quite OT for the list, but I feel someone can help me somehow.
I have been doing some personal research into the design lineage of business-oriented systems: things like IBM System/38 and AS/400, VMS RMS, COBOL, dBase/Clipper-style data systems, and other midrange/mainframe environments where data management was treated as a central architectural concern rather than as an application afterthought. I recently found bitsavers.org, which has been a wonderful archive of manuals and proposals. One document in particular, an IBM System/38 proposal for the City of Santa Cruz, was quite eye-opening. It helped me understand some of the reasoning behind System/38's design: shared business data, multiple access paths, interactive workstations, single- level storage, and a high-level machine interface. What I am struggling to find is less the "how to operate it" material and more the "why it was built this way" material: design notes, architectural rationale, oral history, internal papers, interviews, or people who worked on these systems and might be willing to talk. I realise this is only marginally BSD-related, though there is some overlap with operating systems history, Unix history, filesystems, compilers, and long-lived systems design. Given the depth of experience on this list, I wondered whether anyone here might know of: * archives or papers that discuss the design choices behind midrange/business systems * people or groups who have collected oral histories around System/38, AS/400, VMS, RMS, PICK, dBase, or similar environments * retired engineers or historians who might be open to a polite question or two * other mailing lists, museums, or archives where this question would be more appropriate I am not looking to burden anyone with a large research request. Even a single pointer, book title, name, or "ask over there instead" would be very welcome. My interest is partly historical and partly practical. I am trying to understand what these systems got right about data-first design, operational durability, application development, and business computing before the modern Unix/Linux/server world became the default lens. Many thanks, and apologies if this is too far outside the list's usual scope. Cheers, Tara
