Problem with Spacewar under Sys V, dbm.h

[Rich Salz]

Okay, fact time.

>Of course it isn't present!  dbm is a Berkeley product..

Totally wrong.  The DBM library was present in Version 7; for some reason
ATT dropped it; nobody seems to know why.  UCB kept it, and improved it to
handle multiple open files, etc.

Now let's go back in time...

A month or two ago someone (zeff at b-tech.uucp?) posted a DBM-like package
to use with News 2.11; from the quick glance I gave it, it did not seem
general enough to be a total DBM replacement.  This could be a totally
unfair assessment.

Many months ago Ken Arnold in \fIUnix Review\fP magazine said that the DBM
package was in the public domain, and some copies appeared on the net.  He
was wrong, articles were cancelled, and the next month there was a
retraction.

Rumor has it that a combination of Chris Torek and James Gosling wrote and
modified a replacement DBM package that Gosling used for the documentation
subsystem that is in the Emacs he wrote while at CMU.  Unipress has a
product based on this "Gosmacs."  I'd love to hear the facts of the
situation.

The key to the DBM package is the clever hasing and block splitting scheme
it uses in maintaining its index files.  Most code I have seen uses this
technique -- if not the exact code; I never compared it against Version 7
sources to know for sure.

Several years ago someone in the UCLA Locus project posted a summary of
how the DBM package does its work.  I sent that description to the GNU
folks.  I would not be surprised if there will eventually be a GNU DBM
package.

Hope all this helps.
	/rich $alz
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