Mike Stonebraker

So we put all the scheduling data in a Postgres database and basically a Postgres application was doing scheduling.

And then it sort of clicked that by and large, most everything you do in an operating system

is managing data at scale.

And you should do that using database technology.

So why don't we just replace at least the upper half of Linux with a database system?

So that was the gist of the academic project.

And we worked on it at Berkeley and Stanford in the early 20s.

And it was very successful.

It clearly worked.

And in the process, the Stanford folks wrote an extension to JavaScript so that you could program, you need some programming world that can talk to your implementation.

So if you're doing what amounts to a programming language,

and you're running on top of what amounts to an operating system that is a database, then the obvious thing to do is put all your state in the database.

And that's exactly what they did.

And so we had an innovative programming language model, an innovative operating system model,

And of course, then the idea was, well, can we start a company?

And so we talked to the VCs.

who to a person said, you're dreaming if you think you're going to displace Linux.

However, this programming language stuff is really nifty.

We had what amounted to extensions to JavaScript that would allow any program to have all of the nice features of a database system.

Stuff was durable.