I heard rather belatedly, and with some shock, of the passing of Bill Kent in December last year.  Although we hadn't been in touch for quite a while, Bill and I worked together in IBM Palo Alto (later Santa Teresa) during the late 1970s and early 1980s, and we were friends at the time.  We shared many of the same technical interests, and I always had the greatest respect for his ideas.  We acted as reviewers for each other's technical writings.  I should add, however, that we did have our disagreements from time to time ... Bill could always be relied on to find the situation in which some approach I was proposing was pretty much guaranteed not to work. 

 

    Bill's best-known technical contribution was his book DATA AND REALITY.  I still treasure my original review draft, with annotations by myself and annotations by Bill on those annotations.  That book was very influential on many people, myself not least, and I've referenced it in my own database book in every edition since the third.  Here's what I say about it in my own book (I know it's very conceited to quote from oneself, and I apologize, but I think what follows captures something of the essence of Bill's contribution): 

 

A stimulating and thought-provoking discussion of the nature of information, and in particular of the conceptual schema.  " This book projects a philosophy that life and reality are at bottom amorphous, disordered, contradictory, inconsistent, nonrational, and nonobjective" (excerpt from the final chapter).  The book can be regarded in large part as a compendium of real-world problems that (it is suggested) existing database formalisms--in particular, formalisms that are based on conventional record-like structures, which includes the relational model--have difficulty in dealing with.  Recommended. 

 

    Technical matters aside, Bill and I also shared a deep love of the desert.  We had overlapping vacations in Death Valley one year, with our respective families; if I recall rightly, it was Bill's first trip to Death Valley.  I have good memories of some of the hikes we did together.  I also remember Bill driving some of the jeep trails with great panache while I trailed very cautiously along behind ... and I remember a subsequent dinner party at his home when he and I spent a happy hour or two showing and comparing our desert slides, only to find after a while that the rest of the company had retired to the kitchen or the garden. 

 

    I'll miss Bill.  He's a great loss to us all.  My sympathies go to Barbara and David and the rest of his family.  I'm sorry now we didn't stay in closer touch; still, I'm glad he was able to fulfill a dream by spending the last few years of his life in the red rock country of Utah.  We will toast his memory tonight.

 

 

Posted 3/10/06