
Ask HN: Any Literature on History of Database? - wlnirvana
There seem to be a lot of texts on history of computing, internet&#x2F;web and OS. Are there any counterparts in database?
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gregjor
Chris Date’s book “An Introduction to Database Systems” is a good place to
start. It focuses on relational databases, which reflects the dominance of
relational database systems for decades now.

Wikipedia has a decent article with history:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database)

Before relational database systems we had a lot of proprietary setups based on
disk files. There were the variants of the hashing-based Pick database. There
was CODASYL, and IBM’s IMS. Relational databases pretty much replaced all of
those, though Pick-style systems are still running here and there.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_system)

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wlnirvana
Date's seems more like a first-course textbook rather than a historical
account.

