Cross-Referenced
†
Shortly after midnight on the night of April 22-23, I updated my entry for Shakespeare's birthday with the following quotation:
"With a little effort, anything can be shown to connect with anything else: existence is infinitely cross-referenced."
— Opening sentence of Martha Cooley's The Archivist
About 24 hours later, I came across the following obituary in The New York Times:
"Edgar F. Codd, a mathematician and computer scientist who laid the theoretical foundation for relational databases, the standard method by which information is organized in and retrieved from computers, died on Friday…. He was 79."
The Times does not mention that the Friday it refers to is Good Friday. God will have his little jokes.
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From Computerworld.com: |
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1969: Edgar F. “Ted” Codd invents the relational database. 1973: Cullinane, led by John J. Cullinane, ships IDMS, a network-model database for IBM mainframes. 1976: Honeywell ships Multics Relational Data Store, the first commercial relational database. |
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For a better (and earlier) obituary than the Times's, see The San Jose Mercury News of Easter Sunday. For some thoughts on death and the afterlife appropriate to last weekend, see The Matthias Defense.
† The Exorcist, 1973