Charles W. Bachman

Charles William "Charlie" Bachman, the "father of databases" who received the ACM A.M. Turing Award for 1973 for creating the first database management system, died June 13 at the age of 92. Born in Manhattan, KS, in 1924, Bachman earned his B.S. in mechanical engineering in 1948, as well as an M.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. He went to work for Dow Chemical in 1950, using mechanical punched-card computing devices to solve networks of simultaneous equations representing data from Dow plants. In 1957, Bachman became head of Dow's Data Processing Department, through which he became a member of Share Inc., and a founding member of the Share Data Processing Committee. In 1960, Bachman joined the General Electric (GE) Production Control Services Group in New York City, using a factory in Philadelphia to test designs for a system to automate factory planning, scheduling, operational control, and inventory control.