Fifty years ago a small team working to automate the business processes of the General Electric Low Voltage Switch Gear Department in Philadelphia built the first functioning prototype of a database management system. The Integrated Data Store was designed by Charles W. Bachman, who later won the ACM’s Turing Award for the accomplishment. He was the first Turing Award winner without a Ph.D., the first with a background in engineering rather than science, and the first to spend his entire career in industry rather than academia. The exact anniversary of IDS is hard to pin down. Detailed functional specifications for the system were complete by January 1962, and Bachman was presenting details of the planned system to GE customers by May of that year. It is less clear from archival materials when the system first ran, but Bachman’s own recent history of IDS suggests that a prototype was operational by the end of that year. According to this May 1962