EDGAR FRANK CODD BORN: AUGUST 19, 1923

DIED: APRIL 18, 2003

BY: TOMMIE LEE WHITEHEAD JR

PERSONAL LIFE

• Edgar F. Codd was the born in August 19, 1923.

• He was born on the Isle of Portland in the county of Dorset on the south

coast of England.

• He was the youngest of seven children.

• His father was a leather manufacturer and his mother a schoolteacher.

EDUCATION• During the 1930s Codd attended Poole Grammar School in Dorset.

• He was awarded a full scholarship to Oxford University (Exeter College),

where he initially studied chemistry.

• Despite the fact that he was eligible for a deferment because of his studies—

he volunteered for active duty and became a flight lieutenant in the Royal Air

Force Coastal Command, flying Sunderlands.

• After the war he returned to Oxford to complete his studies, switching to

mathematics and obtaining his degree in 1948.

WORK•  After a brief period with Macy’s in New York City, working as a sales clerk in the men’s sportswear

department, Codd found a job as a mathematics lecturer at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville,

where he taught for six months.

• Codd’s computing career began in 1949, when he joined IBM in New York City as a programming mathematician, developing programs for the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator(SSEC).

• The SSEC was IBM’s first electromechanical computer. It was a huge and noisy vacuum tube machine.

• He also lived in Washington DC for a brief period, where he worked on IBM’s Card Programmed Electronic Calculator.

• In the early 1950s, he became involved in the design and development of IBM’s 701 computer.

• The 701 was originally known as the Defense Calculator. It was IBM’s first commercially available computer for scientific processing; it was announced in 1952 and formally unveiled in 1953.

• In 1953, Codd left the U.S. and IBM in protest against Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch-

hunting and moved to Ottawa, Canada, where he ran the data processing department for

Computing Devices of Canada Limited.

• This department was involved in the development of the Canadian guided missile program.

• A chance meeting with his old IBM manager led to his return to the U.S. in 1957, when he

rejoined IBM.

• He worked on the design of STRETCH.

• STRETCH was the IBM 7030, which subsequently led to IBM’s 7090 mainframe technology.

• He led the team that developed the world’s first multiprogramming system.

• In 1961, on an IBM scholarship, he moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he attended the

University of Michigan and obtained an M.Sc. and Ph.D. in communication sciences (1965).

His thesis—which was published by Academic Press in 1968 under the title Cellular Automata

—represented a continuation and simplification of von Neumann’s work on self-reproducing

automata.

• In it, Codd showed that the 29 states required by von Neumann’s scheme could be reduced to just eight.

DEATH

• Codd died of a myocardial infarction(heart attack) at his home in Williams Island, Florida, at the age of 79 on April18, 2003.

BIBLIOGRAGHY

• "Edgar F. ("Ted") Codd." Edgar F. Codd. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 Nov. 2014. http

://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/codd_1000892.cfm

• "Edgar F. Codd." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 11 Feb. 2014. Web. 03 Nov. 2014. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_F._Codd