Charlie Bachman graduated with a BS in Mechanical Engineering (Tau Beta Phi) from Michigan State College in 1948 and an MS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1950.
He began working for Dow Chemical in Midland, Michigan in 1950. While there, he started the first computer department for business data processing and launched the SHARE 9PAC project for the IBM 709 computer. At the same time, Bachman pioneered the introduction of probability into the CPM/PERT scheduling that was used for Dow’s new plant construction.
In the early 60’s while working for GE his first assignment was to design and build a generic manufacturing information and control system (MIACS). The MIACS application system that came from this project contained many elements, which underlay most, current day, manufacturing control systems. The MIACS system also lead to the development of the first version of the Integrated Data Store (IDS) the database management system which was the basis for General Electric’s IDS and IDS II, Cullinet's IDMS and a host of other DBMS based on Bachman's Network Data Model. IDS was the first disk-based database management system used in every day production.
Bachman developed data structure diagrams (ER diagrams), commonly known as Bachman diagrams, as a graphical representation of semantic structures within the data.
On April 1, 1983 Bachman Information Systems, Inc. was created to productize the CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering) concepts, which had been developed while at Honeywell and Cullinet. In 1991 the Company went public. In 1996 Bachman Information Systems, Inc. of Burlington, MA and Cadre Technology, Inc. of Providence, RI merged to form a new company, named Cayenne Software, Inc. Bachman’s IDS product and his CASE products are still alive under the CA banner.
Among his many honors and achievements, he was given the Alan M. Turing Award in 1973 for pioneering work in database management systems, elected a "Distinguished Fellow" of the British Computer Society in 1978 for database research and given a Life Achievement Award by the Massachusetts Software Council in 1996. He has been awarded more than twenty U.S. patents for database inventions and 1 British patent for pioneering work on model driven development (executable functional specifications).
Today, Bachman is a consultant living in Tucson, Arizona and is currently working on the story of the development of IDS.
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