It was, yes, and to this day read-only SQL access to certain tables is not that bad of a practice to allow for report-generating apps within a company.

However the idea of exposing SQL databases publicly as an approach never took hold for many reasons we're today aware of. And the idea of public write access is ridiculous right from its premise.

The anti-API rant of this author shows us that those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it.