Graphical data management in a time-shared environment

Abstract

At System Development Corporation there is a conviction that one of the most plausible ways to make the cost of software decline is to build general-purpose software that is capable of solving a variety of problems. SDC's most successful effort in this field has been in the area of general-purpose data management. Our initial large-scale, time-shared data management system, TSS-LUCID, enabled the nonprogrammer to describe, load, query, and maintain a data base. In use for over two years, this system provided enough generality to solve such diverse problems as comparison of salary data in different segments of the aerospace industry, analysis of statistical data for a customer in the oil industry, and monitoring of public-supported cancer research projects. Currently being implemented on the IBM 360 family of computers is an improved, more powerful version called TDMS (Time-Shared Data Management System).