Charles Bachman
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Charles W. Bachman (b. December 11, 1924 in Manhattan, Kansas) 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".
He was elected as a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society in 1977 for his pioneering work in database systems.
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. 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 called Cullinet), which offered a version of IDS that was called IDMS and supported the IBM mainframes.
In 1983, he founded Bachman Information Systems that developed a line of Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) products. The center piece of these products was the BACHMAN/Data Analyst, which provided graphic support to the creation and maintenance of data structure diagrams 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.
He is known to have had heated debates with Dr. Edgar F. Codd, who favored relational model databases over the navigational database approaches trumpeted by Bachman.
