How Charles Bachman Invented the DBMS, a Foundation of Our Digital World

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. 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.