Ingres (database) - History

History

In 1973 when the System R project was getting started at IBM, the research team released a series of papers describing the system they were building. Two scientists at Berkeley, Michael Stonebraker and Eugene Wong, became interested in the concept after reading the papers, and decided to start a relational database research project of their own.

They had already raised money for researching a geographic database system for Berkeley's economics group, which they called Ingres, for INteractive Graphics REtrieval System. They decided to use this money to fund their relational project instead, and used this as a seed for a new and much larger project. For further funding, Stonebraker approached the DARPA, the obvious funding source for computing research and development at the time, but both the DARPA and the Office of Naval Research (ONR) turned them down as they were already funding database research elsewhere. Stonebraker then introduced his idea to other agencies, and, with help from his colleagues he eventually obtained modest support from the NSF and three military agencies: the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Army Research Office, and the Navy Electronic Systems Command.

Thus funded, Ingres was developed during the mid-1970s by a rotating team of students and staff. Ingres went through an evolution similar to that of System R, with an early prototype in 1974 followed by major revisions to make the code maintainable. Ingres was then disseminated to a small user community, and project members rewrote the prototype repeatedly to incorporate accumulated experience, feedback from users, and new ideas. Ingres remained largely similar to IBM's System R in concept, but it was based on "low-end" systems, namely Unix on DEC machines.