Charles Bachman - Definition and Overview

Charles W. Bachman is a prominent computer scientist, particularly in the area of databases.

He received the Turing Award in 1973 for "his outstanding contributions to database technology".

Bachman is somewhat unusual for a Turing Award winner as he spent his entire career as an industrial researcher rather than in academia. Initially starting work in 1950 at Dow Chemical, he rose to the position of Data Processing manager before leaving in 1960 to join General Electric, where he developed the IDS - Integrated Data Store, one of the first database management systems.

Later in his career, he joined a smaller firm, Cullinan Information Systems, and became a freelance consultant, specialising in CASE tools and the reverse engineering of obsolete mainframe databases.

He is known to have had heated debates with Dr. Codd, who favored relational model databases over the Navigational Database approaches trumpeted by Bachman.

External Links and sources

• http://www.cbi.umn.edu/collections/inv/cbi00125.html - listing of a collection of Bachman's papers at the University of Minnesota