[dhosek]

Having dealt with the clunky record structures of 60s operating systems, they did have their advantages, but the spread of cross-platform tools in the 80s and 90s killed them since Unix only knew byte streams. There are, I think some vestiges of it in the distinction between text and binary files on Windows (assuming that this still exists), but otherwise Unix’s everything is a stream of bytes has won. I kind of miss knowing that I had a file consisting of, e.g., 256-byte blocks.

[tenebrisalietum]

I'd have to look into it, but I think the whole reason for text vs. binary demarcation is the fact that ASCII text (not Unicode, old-school ASCII with valid characters 0x01-0x7F) could be sent over a 7-bit serial interface and binary needed that extra bit so you had to introduce overhead to make sure everything reached the other side. Because you might have had actual 7-bit serial (or less) teletypewriters connected in the 60's.

[dhosek]

On DOS it also came into play in how line endings were handled.

[chasil]

It went further down than the OS. COBOL implements ISAM databases right in the language as part of the standard. GnuCOBOL has a few DBM options for this when building the compiler.

[hedora]

The CODASYL vs relational calculus thing certainly had an impact too.

Navigational databases had gotten incredibly complicated, allowing the relational people to lap them.