When Michael Stonebraker gave the lecture that comes with the A.M. Turing Award — computing's highest honor, and in his year the first to carry a $1 million prize — he spent much of it on a bicycle. In the summer of 1988 he and his wife rode a tandem across the country, setting out from Anacortes, Washington. He built the talk around the parallels between that ride and the decade he spent building a database called Postgres.
Both started in exhilaration. Both hit stretches where the work had to be thrown out and begun again. What carried each one, in his telling, was perseverance and a good deal of luck.
Stonebraker had already built one commercial database at the University of California, Berkeley before Postgres. Students trained on that earlier project went on to build most of the leading database packages of the era, according to the Association for Computing Machinery, among them the system a young Microsoft later licensed.
Postgres he gave away. It has no corporate owner and is maintained by volunteers scattered across many employers. Companies built on top of it have changed hands for more than $2.6 billion, according to a history written by one of his students. Stonebraker started nine or 10 companies of his own besides; one sold to Hewlett-Packard in 2011 for $340 million.
The part that surprises people who work for a living is that he did not write the code. That same history notes he was never a coder and stayed deliberately clear of his development team. He supplied the argument for what the thing ought to be and let people better at building it build it.
He turned 83 in October and is still publishing research and still serving as chief technology officer of a startup. He titled that Turing Award lecture "The Land Sharks are on the Squawk Box."
Rick Good spent ten years in the newspaper business, including with The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) and The Greenville News (Greenville, SC). He co-wrote, with Melinda Coleman, Rutledge to Riley: Governors of South Carolina, 1776–Present (Published by The Greenville News), and is the author of Mind Games Trivia #1 (Amazon). He has recently spent 15 years creating original trivia content through Sounds Good Mobile Entertainment and continues that with his new company, SGME Software. He edits The Smart Reader’s money, real estate, and business coverage.