Bachman, Charles W.

Charles William Bachman spent over forty-four years in the software development industry. He specialized in database systems and analyzed the concept and execution of pair relationships extensively. Bachman joined Dow Chemical in 1950 and held several positions with the firm before becoming Data Processing Research Manager in 1955. He left Dow in 1960 to work for General Electric (GE) in New York where he developed the Integrated Data Store (IDS), one of the first database management systems. He later transferred as Manager of Software Product Planning to the GE Computer Department in Phoenix, Arizona (1964-1970) where he further refined database management techniques.

When Honeywell Information Systems (HIS) acquired GE's computer operations in 1970, Bachman was the first employee to move from Phoenix to the HIS facility in Waltham, Massachusetts to continue his work with database management. While he was senior staff scientist at HIS, Bachman received the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for his pioneering efforts in database management systems. Believing that database management research needed to proceed in a different direction than HIS took, Bachman joined Cullinane Database Systems (later Cullinet) as Vice President for Applied Research in 1980. He founded his own firm, Bachman Information Systems, in 1983 and consulted for Cullinet until 1986. Bachman Information Systems, specialized in reverse engineering obsolete mainframe database systems, developed and marketed Computer-Aided Software Engineering (CASE) products for the Information Systems (IS) market, and developed the partnership and enterprise models for database management in its business partnership with IBM.

From the guide to the Charles W. Bachman papers, 1951-2007, (University of Minnesota Libraries. Charles Babbage Institute. [cbi])