I can imagine that, but MySQL didn't really start to become a competitive relational database until the 3.23 timeframe (around 2000), and it is hard to imagine MyISAM (with no actual transaction support) being used for a production database except under very carefully controlled circumstances.
To some degree that was true of a lot of earlier competing databases as well, which tended to take escalating locks on everything from the page level on up just to implement basic read consistency. So any transaction of any type could easily lock up a random set of unrelated rows if not entire tables until completion.
To some degree that was true of a lot of earlier competing databases as well, which tended to take escalating locks on everything from the page level on up just to implement basic read consistency. So any transaction of any type could easily lock up a random set of unrelated rows if not entire tables until completion.