Historical Reflections How Charles Bachman Invented the DBMS, a Foundation of Our Digital World
viewpoints VDOI:10.1145/2935880 Thomas Haigh Historical Reflections How Charles Bachman Invented the DBMS, a Foundation of Our Digital World His 1963 Integrated Data Store set the template for all subsequent database management systems. IFTY-THREE YEARS AGO a small team working to automate the business processes of the General Electric Company built the first database man- Fagement system. The Integrated Data Store—IDS—was designed by Charles W. Bachman, who won the ACM’s 1973 A.M. Turing Award for the accomplish- ment. Before General Electric, he had spent 10 years working in engineering, finance, production, and data process- ing for the Dow Chemical Company. He was the first ACM A.M. Turing Award winner without a Ph.D., the first with a background in engineer- ing rather than science, and the first to spend his entire career in industry rather than academia. Some stories, such as the work of Babbage and Lovelace, the creation of the first electronic computers, and the emergence of the personal computer industry have been told to the public again and again. They appear in popu- lar books, such as Walter Isaacson’s recent The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, and in museum exhibits on computing and innova- tion. In contrast, perhaps because da- tabase management systems are rarely Figure 1. This image, from a 1962 internal General Electric document, conveyed the idea COURTESY OF CHARLES W. BACHMAN AND THE CHARLES BABBAGE INSTITUTE. BABBAGE AND THE CHARLES BACHMAN W. OF CHARLES COURTESY experienced directly by the public, of random access storage using a set of “pigeon holes” in which data could be placed.
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