Mike Stonebraker

And even at the time, IBM realized that trees were not general enough to solve many people's problems.

So they hacked on a way to make it a limited network structure.

So it was clear that was a horrible hack.

The Codacil proposal had all kinds of bad properties besides being low level and really hard to debug.

It also had the property that if anything changed in your, what's now called your schema, you basically had to throw away everything and do it all again because it was absolutely rooted at the physical level.

Whereas Ted Codd's stuff made perfect sense.

And so Gene said, well, let's build one of these puppies.

That's clearly the next thing to try.

So we started building Ingress in 1972.

I was an assistant professor at Berkeley.

As you know, if you're an assistant professor, you get five years to prove that you're a big shit.

And they fire you or they give you tenure.

So Ingress was my ticket to getting tenure, which happened in 1976.

That was where it started.

And then again, happenstance.

At the time, a lot of people would build prototypes, which were sort of studenty-like code, which means you could get it to run, but if you gave it to anybody else, they couldn't.

So we put in the first 90% to get something we could run.

And then for whatever reason, we put in the next 90% to get it to where it really worked.

So the University of California version of Ingress really worked.

And so over the next couple of years, about 100 universities started running it because Unix became the big thing.