On 11/14/2014 12:54 PM, Barkmeyer, Edward J wrote:
> Information modeling has been around as a discipline since Peter Chen
> in 1976 and we have been teaching database designers and administrators
> that technology since at least 1990... (01)
Under the name 'logic', information modeling has been around as
a discipline since the 3rd century BC. Diagrams for representing
type hierarchies were probably around at the same time, but the
earliest recorded (or copied) diagrams are from the 3rd c AD. (02)
In AI and MT, diagrams were used since 1956. But analysts for
systems and procedures -- executed by humans, sometimes aided by
punched-card machines -- used diagrams much earlier. IBM published
manuals for "dataflow charts" within and among its machines since
the 1920s. Those diagrams included steps performed by people who
carried boxes of cards from one machine to another. (03)
But the "efficiency experts" from the early 20th c wrote books
about how to analyze "systems and procedures". They were profusely
illustrated with paper forms to be filled out, and they included
flow charts for the people who carried the forms from one office
(or machine) to another. See the book by C. E. Knoeppel from 1915:
https://ia600607.us.archive.org/3/items/installingeffici00knoe/installingeffici00knoe.pdf (04)
For a history of the diagrams used for semantic nets and related
information, see http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/semnet.htm (05)
P. P. Chen's 1976 paper was very widely cited because (1) it had a
catchy name (Entity-Relationship Diagrams), (2) it used the IBM
plastic template for drawing the shapes, and (3) it was published
in Vol. 1, No. 1, of TODS. (06)
But Bachman published similar diagrams about 7 years earlier:
Charles Bachman, Data Structure Diagrams, in _DataBase: A Quarterly
Newsletter of SIGBDP_, vol. 1, no. 2, Summer 1969. (07)
Also in 1969, Ted Codd published his relational DB article in CACM,
which stimulated a large amount of the logic-based DB work. (08)
Codd was also a reviewer of P. P. Chen's article, and he wrote
several pages of comments and corrections, which led to a major
revision of the paper before it was published. (09)
John (010)
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