Mythbusters, SQL Server History follow up

A while back I posted this entry about the history of SQL Server, one of the requests from folks who read the article was to post some box shots, well after a slightly amusing experience we finally managed to open the trophy cabinet that has all the old boxes in it.

These are presented below for your viewing pleasure :-)

First off one of the 5 1/4 " installation floppies for SQL Server 1.0. All the disks were there, still in their little plastic baggie.

The admin guide for 1.0.

The table map for Pubs! How cool is that. The map is being held by my able assistant for the photos, Umachandar Jayachandran(UC), who is a former SQL Server MVP and currently a PM on the SQL Server Perf Team.

Before we get going on the rest of the boxes here is a nostalgia shot thanks to Dougie, SQL Admin Facility, the admin tool from SQL Server 1.1 running on OS/2.

Now the first of the signed boxes, we've upgraded to 4 3 1/2" floppies plus one for the LAN bits. If you look tot he right you can see a signature from Ted Hart, when I first met him he was the Dev lead on DTS (he worked on the Package, the Pump, DMO and a bunch of other stuff), he is still with MS and works on Natural Language support, he moved just before the end of SQL 2000.

More signatures on the same box, this notable one is Mike Habben, who's name is in the centre of the Q. Mike is still in the SQL Server Team and is the Dev Mgr for the SQL Server Replication and Sync Team.

Now onto the 6.0 box, Mike Habben again makes an appearance in the middle of the Q. A couple of new names appear here, Gavin Jancke who is just below the 6.0 Version number worked on Enterprise Manager, SQL Agent, SCM and a bunch of other stuff in the tools, he left just after 7.0 shipped and went to work in MSR, where he still is, and helped work on SPOT and also the research project that lead to the Vista Side Bar. Also on the box top right is Amrish Kumar, Amrish worked on Data Access and SQL Server Engine, he is still with the SQL Team and is currently Director of Perf Engineering. Ted Hart appears on the left of the braid and below and to the right of him is Ben Willk, Ben started in localization and was a dev on Enterprise Manager for 7.0 through until the first couple of years on SQL2005.

Rapidly moving onto 6.5 (just as the team did), another signed box, Amrish appears top left on this one and Ted Hart appears again top centre of the "braid" and Ben is at the bottom.

SQL 7 starts to get hard to read the signatures but in the red box in the middle, I think you can read, Ben Wilk, Hal Berenson (one of the Architects), Billie Jo Murray (customer czar) and Kishnan Nedungadi, who was the Dev for the DTS Wizard and Designer. There was an amusing feature in 7.0 when you saved a DTS Package and were not on a domain, from Win9x, the owner field got set to Kishnan's name! What he had done was had a default owner field in the code, and used his own name one day when testing and then never removed it. We discovered it after SP1 was shipped when a bunch of users starting posting in newsgroups, "Who is this kishnan guy and why does he own my packages?"

The next signature gets a box by himself, Steve Ballmer who did the launch at Comdex, in Las Vegas.

We never did a signed box for 2000 for whatever reason, so instead here are some box shots from various SQL Server 2000 international SKUs courtesy of Fernardo Caro who was the Internationalisation PM for OLAP in 7.0, the box in 2000 and is back to box PM again having been the TAP/Community guy for SQL 2005.

Finally UC makes an appearance again, not only is SQL Server 2005 bigger in terms of features and disk space than SQL 2000, the signed box is also a little bigger :-)

There are a couple that I did not post, you can find them here.