My most productive single act as an IBM manager had nothing to do with product development. It was sending a promising engineer to go as a full-time IBM employee in mid-career to the University of Michigan to get a PhD. This action, which at the time seemed to a busy computer architecture manager to be just a quite incidental personnel activity, had a payoff for IBM beyond my wildest dreams. Ted Codd’s PhD prepared him for a research career; his research led him to invent the relational database concept and to receive a Turing Award.5 Relational databases have been the principal application of
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