Details

Type

Text

Title

Morgenthaler (Gary) Oral History

Contributor

Johnson, Luanne, Editor

Johnson, Luanne, Interviewee

Morgenthaler, Gary J, Interviewee

Publisher

Computer History Museum

Date

2005-12-08

Place of Publication

Menlo Park, Calif.

Extent

35 p.

Description

In this interview, Gary Morgenthaler discusses his career as a programmer with Stanford University and Tymshare, an early time-sharing company, as a consultant with McKinsey & Company, and as a founder, COO and CEO of Ingres, one of the major database software vendors of the 1980s. Ingres (originally called Relational Technology, Inc.) was founded in 1980 to commercialize the INGRES database technology developed at UC Berkeley. He describes the intense competition between Ingres and Oracle throughout the 1980s and how Ingres began to lose momentum in the late 1980s, leading to the sale of the company to ASK Computer Systems. In the 1990s, Morgenthaler became a venture capitalist, running the West Coast office of Morgenthaler Ventures, the venture capital firm founded by his father in Cleveland. As a venture capitalist, he was instrumental in the founding of Illustra to market POSTGRES, also developed at UC Berkeley. Illustra was subsequently sold to Informix and then to IBM.

Category

Transcript

Subject

Software business history; Ingres Corporation; Morgenthaler, Gary J; Morgenthaler Ventures; Institute for Math Studies in the Social Sciences; Tymshare, Inc.; Demand paging; TYMCOM-10; DECsystem 10; Tymnet; McKinsey & Company; Relational Technology, Inc.; Wong, Gene; Stonebraker, Michael; Rowe, Larry; Nakerud, Jon; QUEL; SQL standard; Sippl, Roger; ASK Computer Systems; Oracle; Newton, Paul; Illustra; POSTGRES; Williams, Dick

Collection Title

Oral Histories Online

Accession Number

102658005