Michael Stonebraker is a computer scientist, who started his career as a young professor at the University of California-Berkeley. He began working on INGRES, which stands for “Interactive Graphic and Retrieval System”, and had the first prototype ready by 1974. The project was not done though. INGRES then went on to build a market of relational database systems, which replaced filing cabinets and the standard way of storing and retrieving data. Stonebraker led the development of INGRES until 1985, with the help of grant money and with the help from graduate and undergraduate students. Stonebraker stated that they “would recruit the smartest freshman and sophomores [they] could find, give them wonderful equipment, and they would basically die writing code for [them].” INGRES was suitable for affordable minicomputers and was widely distributed among universities and schools. INGRES brought a new type of database technology, which interested businesses at the time greatly. From the early 1970s and onwards, businesses have been using databases to store and retrieve all their information. In the mainframe world, these systems ran on mainframes, and remained dominant throughout the 1980s.
Since INGRES became so technologically advanced, it became the default choice for minicomputer databases in the 1970s. This shifted much of the responsibility of organizing and retrieving data from the user to the software for the database. INGRES also had crash recovery and efficient backup and restoring abilities, which lead it to be a very strong technological product.