The IBM Storage and Information Retrieval System, better known by the acronym STAIRS, was a program providing storage and online free-text search of text data. STAIRS ran under the

OS/360 OS/360, officially known as IBM System/360 Operating System, is a discontinued batch processing operating system developed by IBM for their then-new System/360 mainframe computer, announced in 1964; it was influenced by the earlier IBSYS/IBJOB ...

operating system under the

CICS IBM CICS (Customer Information Control System) is a family of mixed-language application servers that provide online transaction management and connectivity for applications on IBM mainframe systems under z/OS and z/VSE. CICS family products ...

IMS Ims is a Norwegian surname. Notable people with the surname include: * Gry Tofte Ims (born 1986), Norwegian footballer * Rolf Anker Ims (born 1958), Norwegian ecologist See also * IMS (disambiguation) Ims is a Norwegian surname. Notable people wit ...

transaction monitors, and supported

IBM 3270 The IBM 3270 is a family of block oriented display and printer computer terminals introduced by IBM in 1971 and normally used to communicate with IBM mainframes. The 3270 was the successor to the IBM 2260 display terminal. Due to the text ...

display terminals.

History

STAIRS was introduced as a product in 1973, but had previously been developed in-house by IBM in support of its antitrust lawsuit in 1969. Originally the product was called simply STAIRS but, with the advent of IBM's " /Virtual Storage" operating systems (such as

OS/VS1 Operating System/Virtual Storage 1, or OS/VS1, is a discontinued IBM mainframe computer operating system designed to be run on IBM System/370 hardware. It was the successor to the Multiprogramming with a Fixed number of Tasks (MFT) option of Sy ...

), the non-CMS versions were later renamed to STAIRS/VS. STAIRS was initially released as an application running under

and

, but a

VM/CMS VM (often: VM/CMS) is a family of IBM virtual machine operating systems used on IBM mainframes System/370, System/390, zSeries, System z and compatible systems, including the Hercules emulator for personal computers. The following versions ...

implementation was developed by IBM Canada in the late 1970s and marketed mostly in Europe, called STAIRS/CMS. STAIRS was succeeded by IBM SearchManager/370 and SearchManager/2 in 1991, and was discontinued in 1992, with support ceasing in 1994.

Description

STAIRS queries were formulated as

boolean expressions In computer science, a Boolean expression is an expression used in programming languages that produces a Boolean value when evaluated. A Boolean value is either true or false. A Boolean expression may be composed of a combination of the Boolean con ...

of desired terms. In addition to the normal boolean functions of AND, OR, and NOT, STAIRS recognized such modifiers as ''adjacent to'' or ''in the same paragraph as''. Plain text documents could also contain so-called ''formatted fields'', which could be used for additional selection. These might contain fixed information such as a date or state name. A powerful feature was that queries could be saved and re-executed. Queries could also be extended; for example, by specifying the result of previous query five AND an additional search term. When search results were displayed for the user, 3270 highlighting was used to emphasize occurrences of search terms.

Uses

STAIRS was used in-house by organizations such as large corporations and government agencies with large collections of unstructured documents. It was also bundled by database providers as a subscription service.

Technical details

STAIRS provided good search performance by indexing every word in a document except user-selectable ''stop words'', usually common words such as "and" or "the." Two levels of index were used, a ''dictionary'' containing one occurrence of each word, and an ''inverted text'' file storing document identification and position information for each occurrence of each word. The actual document text was stored in a third ''text'' file. STAIRS document databases could only be updated

off-line In computer technology and telecommunications, online indicates a state of connectivity and offline indicates a disconnected state. In modern terminology, this usually refers to an Internet connection, but (especially when expressed "on line" ...

. The data (in the non-CMS implementations) was stored in ''

basic direct access method Basic Direct Access Method, or BDAM is an access method for IBM's OS/360 and successors computer operating systems on System/360 and later mainframes. BDAM "consists of routines used in retrieving data from, and storing data onto, direct access de ...

'' (BDAM) files, which caused upgrade and portability problems later in its life-cycle.

References

{{reflist

External links

5740-XR1 IBM Storage and Information Retrieval System/Virtual Storage (STAIRS/VS OS/VS and PC)

5695-070 IBM SearchManager/370 CICS/MVS or VM V1.3

STAIRS Stairs are a structure designed to bridge a large vertical distance between lower and higher levels by dividing it into smaller vertical distances. This is achieved as a diagonal series of horizontal platforms called steps which enable passage ...

Assembly language software IBM mainframe software