One thing I believe was true in the COBOL+JCL world of the 1980s is that you couldn't write a program that would read the name of a file, and then open that file. All files to be accessed had to be specified statically with JCL.
I was part of the Postgres Research Group at UC Berkeley from 1991 to ~1995, working directly for Mike Stonebraker. To be honest, I didn't do any of the research work behind it, although I did port Postgres to Windows NT during this time.
Postgres back then was completely different then what it is now. It was mainly used for PhD and Master's student to hack on for their research. It was a mess internally and was hardly usable for production. I don't think that MySQL went through this style of development.
What eventually happened is that around 1995 SQL was added to Postgres and a bunch of non-Berkeley people started hacking on it. They did a fantastic job, and deserve all the credit for making it what it is today (Stonebraker has publically said this).
Years ago I worked in the VAX/VMS development group at Sybase where SQLServer originated. SQLServer was basically an SQL interpreter consisting of several layers of loops. The innermost loop was written in assembler for speed.
I was able to remove one (1) machine language instruction from that innermost loop. I no longer recall if this resulted in a measurable difference but I've always been proud of this.
I once interviewed at a startup. They asked all kinds of questions, technical and other, which was fine. They made me an offer, which I accepted. Then, I received the following:
"About your offer, here at XXX we have the practice of doing an induction test before signing any contracts with any new hires."
This was the first time I had heard about this. It would have been fine if they did the induction test before they made the offer, but I had never heard of it being done after an offer. I told them:
"I was very surprised to get this message. I thought I had already
gone through all the technical screening steps during the interview
process. To be told that I have to go through another screening
step, even after you verbally made me an offer and had me fill
in all the paperwork, is simply not professional.
I'm inclined to say let's call the whole thing off. It isn't
clear that you really want me to work for you. Can you convince
me that this isn't true?"
Am I remembering correctly?