The Association for Computing Machinery’s Software Award for 1988 has gone to six scientists from IBM’s Almaden Research Centre, San Jose, and three researchers based at the University of California, Berkeley: Donald Chamberlain, Raymond Lorie, Patricia Selinger, and Irving Traiger share the award with ex-IBMers James Gray and Gianfranco Putzolu, for their part in developing System R, the celebrated prototype relational database that paved the way for IBM’s full line of relational database products and the invention of the SQL Structured Query Language, while the Berkeley three were cited for their work on the development of the Ingres raltional database system; the award was presented in Louisville, Kentucky on February 22, at the Association’s annual Computer Science Conference.