Re: An anecdote about Codd on the "back side" of Wikipedia

On Wednesday, March 18, 2015 at 4:41:42 PM UTC-4, Nicola wrote:
> I have stumbled upon the Talk page about Codd in Wikipedia:
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Edgar_F._Codd
>
> where a user has posted the following story:
>
> «Starting in 1967, Luther J. Woodrum implemented a searchable patent
> database at IBM using the APL language. The database was arranged
> similar to a large No-SQL table with classes and sub-classes associated
> with the patent number. The classes and sub-classes represented the
> different searchable fields (columns), eg Inventor, Assignee, Filing
> Date, Claims, etc for any patent. The database held several million
> world-wide patents that were relevant to IBM's business interests. The
> API also had a Boolean based query capability which Luther described as
> n-tuple relational operators. Luther presented this as an example of a
> "database" system in 1970 at his Poughkeepsie IBM Education Center
> class. Ted Codd was a student in this class.»
>
> This anecdote seems to imply that Codd may have been influenced by the
> work of L.J. Woodrum (of whom I've found only a couple of references in
> DBLP and a LinkedIn profile). Of course, in 1970 Codd had already
> written about the relational model (maybe the poster misremembering?),
> and applications of relational formalisms to data were not new (see the
> work by Levein and Maron, cited by Codd itself) but if the above were
> true, I think it would be interesting from a historical point of view,
> and it would be interesting to know more about that system at IBM.
>
> Nicola
>
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That does sound interesting. Have you found out any more? Received on Tue Jun 23 2015 - 20:16:14 CEST