IEEE Annals of the History of Computing

In the history of computing's early years, scholarship on the history of software lagged behind that of the history of computer hardware. This happened even though descriptions of how to program—or adjust, in that time's parlance—computing devices was ...

This set of Reviews covers the 20th Century Fox feature film Prometheus, (directed by Ridley Scott) and "La France en réseaux. Tome I: La rencontre des télécommunications et de l'informatique (1960–1980)" [France in Networks, Volume I: The Meeting of ...

Database management system (DBMS) products became the foundation for many (some say most) of the core applications in every industry, commercial business, and government agency. They became the engine that drove the sale of mainframe computers during ...

E.F. Codd developed his relational database concept within a community that was attempting to create a general-purpose machine for retrieving and reasoning with data. Rather than just making progress toward that goal, this article argues that Codd's ...

This article describes the origins and development of the relational database management systems (RDBMS) industry, focusing on the firms IBM, Oracle, Ingres, Informix, and Sybase in the 1980s. The author analyzes the industry's evolution in terms of the ...

Serving as an informal technical introduction to this Annals special issue on relational database management systems, this article gives an introductory overview of the relational model and discusses the value of Edgar F. (Ted) Codd's model. Then, after ...

The relational data model, proposed by E.F. Codd in 1970, inspired several research projects at IBM and elsewhere. Among these was System R, which demonstrated the commercial viability of relational database systems. This article describes the research ...

To improve performance of repetitive transactions in System R, IBM's Raymond Lorie devised a scheme to create, save, and reuse a generalized access plan that could be instantiated with specific values. The author recounts his role in compiling such ...

Starting in 1977, the founders of the Oracle Corporation created a product and a company which in less than 20 years would come to dominate the DBMS marketplace, and become one of the world’s largest computer software and services companies. ...

Developed at the University of California, Berkeley, beginning in 1972, the INGRES relational database management system was originally a research prototype that helped to prove the viability of relational systems. This article describes the subsequent ...

Stockholm, Sweden, is host to the Nobel Prize Museum (Nobelmuseet) as well as a top-notch science and technology museum center (Tekniska Museet). The museum recently completed a major project that documents the use of computers in Sweden from 1950 to ...

A leading scientist in computing since his graduation from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968, Peter J. Denning is best known for his pioneering work in virtual memory, especially for inventing the working-set model for program behavior, ...

In this Anecdotes department article, Don Chamberlin details his early work with Ray Boyce designing the relational language SQL. After meeting E.F. (Ted) Codd at a symposium at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, in 1972, ...

This Events & Sightings installment covers a range of recent events focusing on the history of computing. Luanne Johnson gives a brief obituary of Lawrence A. (Larry) Welke, who in the mid-1960s became the world's first publisher dedicated to the ...

According to Software Magazine, the top 500 companies in the computer software and services industry generated $640 billion dollars in revenue in 2012 and employed more than 4.1 million people who design, program, maintain, sell, or support computer ...