It's a good point. At one time the database was the application. Stored procedures and such were part of the application UI (as it were). At one time features were being added to database systems you could build command-line interfaces for the end-users. These days the database is mostly just used as a storage engine.

Not that I really care about "back in the day!" But it can be helpful to understand why certain things were done in a certain way. It seems like ancient history, but there you definitely will find some old code when you start working at companies that have been around for more than a few years.