Month: October 2009

Tonight Don Chamberlin will receive a 2009 Fellow Award of the Computer History Museum “for his fundamental work on structured query language (SQL) and database architectures”. The other awardees for 2009 are Robert R. Everett (M.I.T. Whirlwind and SAGE) and Federico Faggin, Marcian (Ted) Hoff, Stanley Mazor and Masatoshi Shima (Intel 4004).

In a recent oral history I conducted for the Computer History Museum, Don put into context his work designing SQL in collaboration with Ray Boyce. Don described the pre-relational database management systems, Ted Codd’s development of the relational model, various implementation projects at IBM culminating in System R, which was the first RDBMS to support SQL. Don went on to describe other pioneering relational systems, including Ingres and Oracle. He also described his subsequent work on text processing, DB/2, and XQuery.

For further historical information about Don and his work, see:

• Burt Grad, Moderator. RDBMS Workshop: Technology Through 1983, Computer History Museum, June 12, 2007. http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/accession/102658267
• Donald D. Chamberlin, OH 329. Oral history interview by Philip L. Frana, 3 October 2001, San Jose, California. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/107215
• Paul McJones, editor. The 1995 SQL Reunion: People, Projects, and Politics. Technical Note 1997-018, Systems Research Center, Digital Equipment Corporation, August 1997. https://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/tech_reports/SRC-TN-1997-018.pdf

Update 2018/04/21: updated URL at Charles Babbage Institute.

Update 2023/02/28: updated URLs for 2009 CHM Fellow Awards and SRC-TN-1997-18

Update 2024/05/08: updated URL for SRC-TN-1997-18 again.

Last month, Bob Taylor (the subject of a recent oral history) was recognized by The University of Texas. Bob received the Graduate School Outstanding Alumnus Award, a $100,000 Presidential Endowed Fellowship was established in his name, and he gave the first in a series of lectures in the UT Graduate School’s Centential celebration. Since this is also the 40th anniversary of the first tests of the ARPAnet, it was a fitting time for Bob’s achievements to be honored.

The lecture was in the form of an interview by New York Times technology reporter John Markoff, who noted:

The Internet has many fathers, but few deserve the label more than Robert W. Taylor.

Authors M. Mitchell Waldrop (The Dream Machine) and Michael A. Hiltzik (Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age) shared their views as well. J Strother Moore and Gary Chapman (who each worked with Bob in the past and now have UT positions) served as masters of ceremony.

The announcement for the lecture includes links to news stories about Bob, as well as the famous 1968 paper by Licklider and Taylor, “The Computer as a Communication Device“. The recap of the lecture includes links to a video and photographs.

Update 2024/05/08: Updated URLs via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine; the video and photographs appear to be lost.