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.
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.
FIFTY-THREE YEARS AGO a small team working to automate the business processes of the General Electric Company built the first database management system. The Integrated Data
Store—IDS—was designed by Charles
W. Bachman, who won the ACM’s 1973
A.M. Turing Award for the accomplishment. Before General Electric, he had
spent 10 years working in engineering,
finance, production, and data processing 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 engineering 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 popular 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 innovation. In contrast, perhaps because database management systems are rarely
experienced directly by the public,
DOI: 10.1145/2935880
Figure 1. This image, from a 1962 internal General Electric document, conveyed the idea
of random access storage using a set of “pigeon holes” in which data could be placed.
