Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Treating them as part of “natural history” can cause us to overlook their
importance in structuring the way biologists make knowledge about
life. The computer is more than a mere organizing tool or memory
device—it provides ways of representing, modeling, and testing biologi-
cal systems. The sort of biological databases that arose in association
with computers in the 1960s marked a new kind of object and a new,
“theoretical” way of doing biology.
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A Brief History of Databases
Databases have a history independent of their use in biology. Like the
computer, they were built for specifi c purposes for the military and for
business data management. How do they work? What were they de-
signed to do? The fi rst databases—or data banks, as they were often
called—were built, like so many other tools of the information age,
for military purposes. Thomas Haigh argues that the Semi-Automatic
Ground Environment (SAGE) was the fi rst “data base.” SAGE needed to
keep track, in real time, of the status of bombers, fi ghters, and bases in
order to serve as an automated early warning and coordinated response
system in the event of aerial attack on the United States.
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In the early
1960s, SAGE's creators at Systems Development Corporation were ac-
tively promoting “computer-centered data base systems” to business.
The corporate world soon took up the idea of a management informa-
tion system (MIS), which many hoped would provide an executive with
instant access to all the pertinent information about his organization.
Early MISs were essentially fi le management systems—pieces of soft-
ware that contained generalized subroutines to open, close, and retrieve
data from fi les. This technology was limited, however, by the fact that
data records were stored one after another along a tape, and that to
fi nd a particular record, it was often necessary to scroll through large
portions of tape. The introduction of disks in the early 1960s meant
that data could be accessed at “random,” and new possibilities arose for
organizing data access and storage.
Beginning in 1963, Charles W. Bachman of IBM developed the Inte-
grated Data Store (IDS), which became one of the most effective and in-
fl uential fi le management systems. The IDS, designed for use with disks
rather than tapes, allowed linkages between records in what came to
be known as the “network data model.” To fi nd particular records in
such a system, the user had to navigate from record to record using the
various links.
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A version of the IDS was used to run computers for the
Apollo program in the late 1960s.
