Ask HN: Brian Kernighan's "Q"?

A classic DB paper [1] published in 1984 mentions a DB system called "q" written by Brian Kernighan at Bell labs, but only cites private communication by Al Aho. Does anyone have more information on the system? I couldn't find anything due to the very short name, and that "q" is also the name for the language/database by Arthur Whitney [2]

[1]: https://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/jf/KKFGU-TODS84.pdf

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_(programming_language_from_Kx_Systems)