Details

Type

Text

Title

Durbin (Gary) Oral History

Contributor

Durbin, Gary, Interviewee

Johnson, Luanne, Interviewer; Editor

Publisher

Computer History Museum

Date

2000-05-17

Place of Publication

Oakland, California

Extent

26 p.

Description

In this interview, Gary Durbin discusses his long career as a technologist and entrepreneur in the software industry. He describes the challenges of being a programmer in the 1960s when it was necessary to compensate for the limited capabilities of computers and the intimate knowledge of the internal workings of the machines that he developed as a result. He describes the factors that led him to found Cybernetic Systems, Tesseract, and Seeker Software and how the difficulty of competing against IBM's announced, but undeveloped, product convinced him that an independent software company providing application software would be less vulnerable to IBM's market domination than a systems software company. He talks about the difficulties that software companies had in obtaining venture capital financing in the 1970s, about the challenges of changing his company from a services business model to a product business model and about the strengths and weaknesses of his competitors in the payroll/HR marketplace.

Category

Transcription

Subject

Durbin, Gary; Hogan, Bernie; Cybernetic Systems; Secure software product; Boole & Babbage; Remote Access Control Facility (RACF); Interpers (Interactive Personnel System); Online human resources system; Tessaract; In-Sci; Integral Systems; Duffield, David A.; Ceredian; Seeker Software

Collection Title

Oral Histories Online

Accession Number

102702137