establish a “totally integrated management information system.” 8 This would integrate and automate all the core operations of a business, ideally with advanced management reporting and simulation capabilities built right in. The latest and most expensive computers of the era had new capabilities that seemed to open the door to a more aggressive approach. Compared to the machines of the 1950s they had relatively large memories. They featured disk storage as well as tape drives, could process data more rapidly, and some were even used to drive interactive terminals.

The reality of data processing changed much more slowly than the hype, and remained focused on simple administrative applications that batch processed large files to accomplish tasks such as weekly payroll processing, customer statement generation, or accounts payable reporting.

Many companies announced their intention to build totally integrated management information systems, but few ever claimed significant success. A modern reader would not be shocked to learn that firms were unable to create systems of comparable scope to today’s Enterprise Resources Planning and data warehouse projects using computers with perhaps the equivalent of 64KB of memory, no real operating system, and a few megabytes of disk storage. Still, even partially integrated systems covering significant portions of a business would have real value. The biggest roadblocks to even modest progress toward this goal were the sharing of data between applications and the difficulties application programmers faced in exploiting random access disk storage.

Getting a complex job done might
involve dozens of small programs and
the generation of many working tapes
full of intermediate data. These banks
of whirring tape drives provided com-
puter centers with their main source
of visual interest in the movies of the
era. Tape-based processing techniques
evolved directly from those used with
pre-computer mechanical punched
card machines: files, records, fields,
keys, grouping, merging data from
two files, and the hierarchical combi-
nation of master and detail records
within a single file. These applied to
database history has been largely ne-
glected. For example, the index of Isaa-
cson’s book does not include entries
for “database” or for any of the four
people to have won Turing Awards in
this area: Charles W. Bachman and Ed-
gar F. Codd (1981), James Gray (1988),
or Michael Stonebraker (2014).

That’s a shame, because if any technology was essential to the rebuilding of our daily lives around digital infrastructures, which I assume is what Isaacson means by “the Digital Revolution,” then it was the database management system. Databases undergird the modern world of online information systems and corporate intranet applications. Few skills are more essential for application developers than a basic familiarity with SQL, the standard database query language, and a database course is required for most computer science and information systems degree programs. Within ACM, SIGMOD—the Special Interest Group for Management of Data—has a long and active history fostering database research. Many IT professionals center their entire careers on database technology: the census bureau estimates the U.S. alone employed 120,000 database administrators in 2014 and predicts faster than average growth for this role.

Bachman’s IDS was years ahead of its time, implementing capabilities that had until then been talked about but never accomplished. Detailed functional specifications for the system were complete by January 1962, and Bachman was presenting details of the planned system to his team’s in-house customers by May of that year. It is less clear from archival materials when the system first ran, but Bachman tells me that a prototype installation of IDS was tested with real data in the summer of 1963, running twice as fast as a custom-built manufacturing control system performing the same tasks.

The details of IDS, Bachman’s life story, and the context in which it arose have been explored elsewhere. 2, 6 In this column, I focus on two specific questions:

˲ Why do we view IDS as the first database management system, and

˲ What were its similarities and differences versus later systems?

There will always be an element
of subjectivity in judgments about
“firsts,” particularly as IDS predated
the concept of a database management
system. As a fusty historian I value nu-
ance and am skeptical of the idea that
any important innovation can be fully
understood by focusing on a single
breakthrough moment. I have docu-
mented many ways in which IDS built
on earlier file management and report
generation systems. 7 However, if any
system deserves the title of “first data-
base management system” then it is
clearly IDS. It became a model for the
earliest definitions of “data base man-
agement system” and included most of
the core capabilities later associated
with the concept.

What Was IDS For?

Bachman created IDS as a practical tool, not an academic research project. In 1963 there was no database research community. Computer science was just beginning to emerge as an academic field, but its early stars focused on programming language design, theory of computation, numerical analysis, and operating system design. In contrast to this academic neglect, the efficient and flexible handling of large collections of structured data was the central challenge for what we would now call corporate information systems departments, and was then called business data processing.

During the early 1960s the hype and reality of business computing diverged dramatically. Consultants, visionaries, business school professors, and computer salespeople had all agreed that the best way to achieve real economic payback from computerization was to If any technology was essential to the rebuilding of our daily lives around digital infrastructures, it was the database management system.