Biography
Charles Bachman was born in Manhattan, Kansas in 1924, where his father, Charlie Bachman, was the head football coach at Kansas State College. He attended high school in East Lansing, Michigan.
In World War II he joined the United States Army and spent March 1944 through February 1946 in the South West Pacific Theater serving in the Anti-Aircraft Artillery Corps in New Guinea, Australia, and the Philippine Islands. Here he was first exposed to and used fire control computers for aiming 90 mm guns.
After his discharge in 1946 he attended Michigan State College and graduated in 1948 with a bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering (Tau Beta Phi). He then attended the University of Pennsylvania. In 1950, he graduated with a master's degree in Mechanical Engineering, and had also completed three-quarters of the requirements for an MBA from the university's Wharton School of Business.
In 1950 he started working at Dow Chemical in Midland, Michigan. After ten years in 1960 he joined General Electric, where he developed the Integrated Data Store (IDS). In 1983 he would found Bachman Information Systems, where he developed Computer-Aided Software Engineering (CASE) products.
He received the ACM Turing Award in 1973 for "his outstanding contributions to database technology". He was elected as a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society in 1977 for his pioneering work in database systems.
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