I should add that the bond between relational databases and spinning rust goes back further. My dad, who started working as a programmer in the 60s with just magtape as storage, talked about the early era of disks as a big step forward but requiring a lot of detailed work to decide where to put the data and how to find it again. For him, databases were a solution to the problems that that disks created for programmers. And I can certainly imagine that. Suddenly you have to deal with way more data stored in multiple dimensions (platter, cylinder, sector) with wildly nonlinear access times (platter rotation, head movement). I can see how commercial solutions to that problem would have been wildly popular, but also build around solving a number of problems that don't matter.
I'm not sure I totally understand the timeline you're describing, but my understanding is that relational databases themselves were only invented in the 1970s. Is your reference to the 60s just giving context for when he started but before this link happened (with the idea that the problems predated the solution)?
Non-relational databases existed in the 60s, and many programmers who worked in the 60s presumably continued working into the 70s, so either way I don't see any problems with the timeline GP mentions.
Sure, I never claimed that relational databases were the first ones. I was confused because they were trying to explain a specific timeline different from the article, but only mentioned a single time period that didn't seem likely to be what they intended, and I thought it might make sense to clarify what that time period was. I'm sure this isn't the case for everyone, but at least to me, it's surprising not to be explicit in the information they were trying to claim the article glossed over.
Hierarchical databases, which are often more similar to what we would consider a file system today, predate relational ones by a decade or two.
The parent comment was pretty explicit in what types of databases it was talking about:
> I should add that the bond between relational databases and spinning rust goes back further.
It's certainly possible I failed to infer the point they were trying to make, but personally I would find it confusing for them to only mention one type of database (relational) and one time period (the 60s) if they actually meant a different type of database or a different time period in their central point of there being a relationship with, in their words, relational databases and spinning rust, in a specific time period other than what the article describes.