written in 1965 and used by IIT for undergraduate instruction. Starkey joined Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1975. At DEC, he created the DATATRIEVE family of products, the DEC Standard Relational Interface, VAX Rdb/ELN, and designed the software architecture for DATATRIEVE'S database. He released DATATRIEVE Version 1 for the PDP-11 in 1977, VAX DATATRIEVE in 1981 as part of the VAX Information Architecture, Rdb/ELN, the Digital Standard Relational Interface, and a variety of uncommercialized database-centric and 4GL proofs of concept. Also at DEC, Starkey invented the BLOB, a “binary large object.”