X> $ purge foobar.txt
Yes, I remember those periodic purges.
I did like the customisable editor too and, IIRD, the ability to attach customisations to file types. If there was an open source version of that editor I might even be using it still.
Worked well too - one of the better COBOL implementations .
The Rdb module.
The one real thumbs-down feature of the project, and the one that sank it, was the bloody awful James Martin Associates system design method and its almost equally poor diagramming rules. I mean, how can a usable Data Structure Diagram ever be built when the overall system design rules forbid you from adding any data items to entities but still let you insert relationships between entities? Straight away this means you have: (a) no way of verifying that the relationship is needed (b) no way of validating end-to-end data flows through the system DSD.
IOW there's no way that you can verify the DSD, let alone get it reviewed and signed off.
...and meanwhile we, the database design team, were never able to build built a schema because the system designers never did hand us a usable DSD to work from.
That surprised me because I'd bought a copy of James Martin's "Design of Man-Computer Dialogs" - IMO one of the best books on application system design I've ever seen. I bought my copy about ten years prior to that fiasco and used it extensively when a small team of us were building BBC Radio Three's music planning system: This was a complex system that had to track and record every stage of building and broadcasting a concert from the producer's original idea, checking that it wasn't too similar to any other concert that would be broadcast around the target date, tracking and booking all the performers and then, after the broadcast, making sure they were paid as well as handling the repeat fees paid to performers if any parts of a concert are rebroadcast later.
I doubt that this system, known as Orpheus, would have gone together half so well without the ideas in that book,
For the record, it was built on an ICL 2966 mainframe, written in COBOL and using IDMSX, a Codasyl database, as its data store. A BBC internal team, with me as an external member, had completed that that about ten years before the fiasco on the VAX.
IIRC there were even JMA consultants on the team that failed complete the financial system on the VAX, but despite their presence, We never did get a completed data structure to work from before the project collapsed.