Early Development
Nomad was developed by National CSS, Inc., at the time in Stamford, Connecticut (later Wilton), by a small team launched in 1973. It was developed to supplant RAMIS, previously a major NCSS offering. The corporate view of Nomad's importance at the time – and of tensions with the owners of RAMIS – can be deduced from the original NOMAD acronym: NCSS Owned, Maintained, And Developed. Another RAMIS successor was FOCUS, which evolved in competition with Nomad. These and other 4GL platforms such as Oracle competed for many of the same customers, all trying to solve end-user information problems without recourse to traditional 3GL programming.
Nomad was officially released in October 1975 (although customer usage began in May 1975). The Nomad customer base expanded rapidly, as new categories of users adopted time-sharing data management tools to solve problems they previously could not tackle. Nomad competed principally with Focus and Ramis for this expanding market.
Nomad was claimed to be the first commercial product to incorporate relational database concepts. This seems to be borne out by the launch dates of the well-known early RDBMS vendors, which first emerged in the late 70s and early 80s – such as Oracle (1977), Informix (1980), and Unify (1980). The seminal non-commercial research project into RDBMS concepts was IBM's System R, first installed at IBM locations in 1977. System R included and tested the original SQL implementation. The early RDBMS vendors were able to learn from numerous papers describing System R in the late 70s and early 80s.
Nomad was released before these industry events, and thus, like System R, Nomad drew on earlier academic work by relational database pioneers such as E. F. Codd. Early Nomad development was in particular inspired by C. J. Date's influential An Introduction to Database Systems, itself first published in 1975. This book was an important source of technical ideas about the relational database model, and included a brief mention of SEQUEL (later SQL). Later editions of the book included Nomad itself, and Date's approval of Nomad's support of the relational database model.
At the time, relational database concepts were new; most database systems utilized hierarchical, network, or other data models. Adding relational features to Nomad's original hierarchical design was evidently a bold move for NCSS. Training materials, such as Dan McCracken's book (cited below), focused on these relational database features, and their use in rapid application development. A simple methodology letting end-users design effective, normalized relational databases was soon added to the curriculum – and was later taught on campuses throughout the country, in the ACM Lectureship Series, by NCSS emeritus Lawrence Smith. NCSS can thus be seen as an early advocate of relational methods; but this position was soon eclipsed as SQL-based vendors burst onto the scene.
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