Data Systems Seminar Series • Where the Database Management System Comes From, and Why it Matters

Please note: This seminar will take place in DC 1302.

Thomas Haigh, Professor and Chair
Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

For more than fifty years the database management system (DBMS) has been the essential foundation information systems of all kinds, from enterprise software to personal websites. Developed to support the integration of different applications and data types for corporate mainframes, the DBMS had technological roots in Cold War defense systems.

Thomas Haigh, a leading historian of computing, looks back to the 1960s and 70s for the origins of the DBMS and at related concepts such as the data base administrator, the management information system, and the data warehouse. Today data science is a hot field, and the potential of “data history” is exciting historians of science. Haigh argues that we can’t understand either of those things without recognizing the DBMS as vital infrastructure that mediates and structures interactions between users, applications, and data.

Bio: Thomas Haigh is a professor and chair of the history department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. After studying computer science at Manchester University, he won a Fulbright award for a Ph.D. in the history and sociology of science from the University of Pennsylvania.

He has researched many topics in the history of computing, from database management systems to internet technologies. Haigh is the lead author of A New History of Modern Computing (2021) and ENIAC in Action (2016), both published by MIT Press. At UWM he runs a retrocomputing lab with working systems from the 1980s and 1990s. His current book project is Artificial Intelligence: The History of a Brand.