If there were no OS databases

I figured we could take a break from all of the Q and A stuff and just
chat a bit.

So my friend was telling me today about his programming job back in the
late 80's where he had to pretty much write his own flat file database
from scratch. He had write all of the parsers, handle concurrency, set
semaphores... pretty much everything that we take for granted today.

Anyhow, I was thinking, where would I be today if there were no open
source databases? I certainly wouldn't be where I am today. I came from
the sys/network admin side of the shop. I started writing database
driven web applications and I was hooked. But if MySQL and Postgres
didn't exist, any apps I made would have been pretty boring and I'd
still be configuring routers (yuck).

So what about you? How would your world be different?

Artacus