Jim Starkey was working at 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 dramatically 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. Starkey, however, had the idea after he had spun off his original relational database project to another group and a ensued. Starkey left the company after shipping the first version of the Rdb/ELN product.