Editing InterBase (section)

===Early years===
{{more citations needed section|date=June 2014}}
[[Jim Starkey]] was working at [[Digital Equipment Corporation|DEC]] on their [[DATATRIEVE]] 4th generation language [[4GL]] product when he came up with an idea for a system to manage concurrent changes by many users. The idea simplified the existing problems of ''locking'' which were proving to be a serious problem for the new [[relational database]] systems being developed at the time. 

Although InterBase's implementation is much more similar to the system described by [[David P. Reed|Reed]] in his MIT dissertation than any other database that existed at the time and Starkey knew Bernstein from his previous position at the Computer Corporation of America and later at DEC, Starkey claims that he arrived at the idea of multiversion concurrency control independently.<ref>{{cite web|author=Starkey, Jim|title=Weblog comment|work=Multiversion Concurrency Control Before InterBase|url=http://blogs.teamb.com/craigstuntz/2005/02/18/2699/|access-date=September 21, 2005|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071023164250/http://blogs.teamb.com/craigstuntz/2005/02/18/2699|archive-date=October 23, 2007|url-status=dead}}</ref> According to his blog, Starkey says:

<blockquote>The inspiration for multi-generational concurrency control was a database system done by [[Prime Computer|Prime]] that supported page level snapshots. The intention of the feature was to give a reader a [[Consistency (database systems)|consistent]] view of the database without blocking writers. The idea intrigued me as a very useful characteristic of a database system.</blockquote>