When I first started in IT I was a COBOL programmer and the database I mainly used at that time was IDMSX. We had a large powerfull mainframe that supported over 250 transaction processing applications. The interesting thing was that at a conference my boss got talking to his equivalent from a similar sized organisation. They had the same mix of systems and same sort of user community - only their mainframe had less than half the grunt of ours.
Why? Well they had rejected database technology and kept everything in flat files. I can't vouch for how responsive they were as an IT team but it makes you think.
This highlights something we've all seen happen in IT over time - huge advances in chip, bus, memory, disk and network technology are soaked up by software bloat. OK this is a simplistic argument and in reality corporate IT is doing a lot more than it did 20 years ago, but it still makes me wonder just how those flatfile systems would perform on todays equivalent platforms. I think they'd scream along.
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