Charles Bachman

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Charles Bachman bigraphy, stories - Engineers

Charles Bachman : biography

December 11, 1924 –

Charles William "Charlie" Bachman (born December 11, 1924) is an American computer scientist, who spent his entire career as an industrial researcher rather than in academia. He is particularly known for his work in the area of databases.

Biography

Charles Bachman was born in Manhattan, Kansas in 1924, where his father, Charlie Bachman, was the head football coach at Kansas State College. He attended high school in East Lansing, Michigan.

In World War II he joined the United States Army and spent March 1944 through February 1946 in the South West Pacific Theater serving in the Anti-Aircraft Artillery Corps in New Guinea, Australia, and the Philippine Islands. Here he was first exposed to and used fire control computers for aiming 90 mm guns.

After his discharge in 1946 he attended Michigan State College and graduated in 1948 with a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering (Tau Beta Pi). He then attended the University of Pennsylvania. In 1950, he graduated with a master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering, and had also completed three-quarters of the requirements for an MBA from the university’s Wharton School of Business. at www.computerhistory.org.

In 1950 he started working at Dow Chemical in Midland, Michigan. After ten years in 1960 he joined General Electric, where he developed the Integrated Data Store (IDS). In 1983 he would found Bachman Information Systems, where he developed Computer-Aided Software Engineering (CASE) products.

He received the ACM Turing Award in 1973 for "his outstanding contributions to database technology". He was elected as a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society in 1977 for his pioneering work in database systems.

Work

Bachman spent his entire career as a practicing software engineer rather than in academia. Initially starting work in 1950 at Dow Chemical in Midland, Michigan, he rose to the position of Data Processing manager before leaving in 1960 to join General Electric, where he developed the Integrated Data Store (IDS), one of the first database management systems. Working in conjunction with Weyerhaeuser Lumber, he developed the first multiprogramming access to the IDS database. Later at GE he developed the "dataBasic" product that offered database support to the Basic language timesharing users. Later in his career, he joined a smaller firm, Cullinane Information Systems (later Cullinet), which offered a version of IDS that was called IDMS and supported the IBM mainframes.

Bachman Information Systems

In 1983, he founded Bachman Information Systems, which developed a line of Computer-Aided Software Engineering (CASE) products. The centerpiece of these products was the BACHMAN/Data Analyst, which provided graphic support to the creation and maintenance of Bachman Diagrams. It was featured in IBM’s Reengineering Cycle marketing program, combining:

  1. the reverse engineering of obsolete mainframe databases,
  2. data modeling,
  3. forward engineering to new physical databases, and
  4. optimization of physical database designs for performance and DBMS specifics.

Bachman papers

Bachman papers from 1951 to 2007 are available at the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota. This collection contains detailed archival material describing database software development. It includes documentation on Dow Chemical (1951–1960), General Electric (1960–1970), Honeywell Information Systems (1970–1981), Cullinane Database Systems/Cullinet (1972–1986), Bachman Information Systems, Inc. (1982–1996) as well as several professional organizations.

Publications

Bachman published dozens of publications and papers, at Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota — Collection contains archival materials detailing database software development. Includes documentation on Dow Chemical (1951-1960), General Electric (1960-1970), Honeywell Information Systems (1970-1981), Cullinane Database Systems/Cullinet (1972-1986), Bachman Information Systems, Inc. (1982-1996), Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) (1971-1982), American National Standards Institute (ANSI) (1978-1983) as well as several international standard organizations. a selection: