The Computer History Museum (CHM) announced its 2009 selection of Fellow Award honorees: Robert R. Everett, Don Chamberlin, and the team of Federico Faggin, Marcian Edward “Ted” Hoff, Stanley Mazor and Masatoshi Shima. The 2009 Fellows will be inducted into the Museum’s Hall of Fellows on Oct. 20, 2009 at a formal Gala Ceremony where technology industry leaders and supporters will gather to celebrate the Fellows’ accomplishments and their impact on modern day life.
The Fellow Awards are an extension of the Computer History Museum’s overarching vision to explore the computing revolution and its worldwide impact on the human experience. The tradition began with CHM’s first Fellow, Grace Murray Hopper, inventor of the compiler, and has grown to a distinguished and select group of 47 members. This award represents the highest achievement in computing, honoring the people who have forever changed the world with their innovations.
“The goal of the Fellows program is to annually recognize select individuals of outstanding merit who have significantly contributed to the field of computing,” said John Hollar, CHM’s President and CEO. “The Museum’s Fellows are a distinguished and special group. It’s an honor to bring together industry executives, the people who are currently building the future, to honor and celebrate those who contributed so significantly in the past.”
The 2009 Fellows are:
Robert R. Everett: For his work on the MIT Whirlwind and SAGE computer systems and a lifetime of directing advanced research and development projects.
Don Chamberlin: For his fundamental work on Structured Query Language (SQL) and database architectures.
The Team of Federico Faggin, Marcian Edward “Ted” Hoff, Stanley Mazor, Masatoshi Shima: For their work on the Intel 4004, the world’s first commercial microprocessor.
The Museum will host the annual Gala Ceremony in honor of the achievements of the 2009 Fellows whose creativity, persistence, vision, and global influence in the field of computing have helped reshape our everyday lives. The Fellows candidates were nominated by the public and selected by an esteemed panel including CHM executives, technology historians, industry leaders and executives, led by Board of Trustees Member Ike Nassi, Executive Vice President, SAP.
For more information on the 2009 Fellow Awards, please visit: http://www.computerhistory.org/fellowawards/.
Don guest blogs for us today:
It was a very great privilege for me to be at the IBM San Jose Research Laboratory (precursor to Almaden Research Center) in the 1970's. Ted Codd had published his groundbreaking paper introducing the relational data model. Researchers had been brought together from several IBM locations to build System R, an industrial-strength implementation of Codd's ideas. Jim Gray was working on transactional semantics, for which he would win the ACM Turing Award. Pat Selinger and Raymond Lorie were building the world's first cost-based relational query optimizer. Ray Boyce and I were designing the SQL language. We were sending early prototypes to IBM customers and learning from their experiences. There was a sense of excitement and optimism that our work would have an impact on the world. Opportunities like this are rare and I am grateful to been a part of the System R team. Recognition for our accomplishments belongs to the whole team and especially to Ted Codd, whose ideas provided our inspiration.
