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FOCUS: Then and Now
I remember working on a 4K-memory machine in college and using punch cards and paper tape. Do you? An associate here at Information Builders talked of being at a flea market with his 7-year-old daughter who asked him, "Daddy, what's that?" He turned around – it was a typewriter! Ahh, the days of old.
Mainframe FOCUS has such legacies too after 30 years – and it's still going strong, I might add. So, each issue going forward, we thought it would be fun to compare what FOCUS was like in the original days with the FOCUS of today. It should be an interesting, if not amusing, sidelight for some of our long-dedicated users. For this issue:
The sheer growth of the FOCUS database is an awe-inspiring change. Originally in 1975, the maximum size of a physical FOCUS database was 256MB. Peter Mittelman, the vice president of the FOCUS Division and one of the original (and present) owners of Information Builders and creators of FOCUS, hides nothing by saying that, back in 1975, he never thought anyone would need anything larger than 256MB.
In the early 1990s, the size was raised to a 1GB limit. Around 2001, it was increased to 2GB, although FUSION files were given 2GB capability in 2000. In 2004, we introduced XFOCUS files that lifted the bar to 16GB. If you include the new database partitioning facility, the total maximum size is now four terabytes! That's a growth of more than 150 times!
One hundred and fifty times – do you realize what that is? If you had $1,000 and it grew 150 times, you – well, you still couldn't buy a house for cash in today's market, but it is a lot, believe me! With only a handful of data warehouses in the world larger than 4GB, FOCUS is certainly keeping pace with the growing needs of our customers.
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