Artifact Details

Title

Morgenthaler, Gary oral history

Catalog Number

102658005

Type

Document

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.

Date

2005-12-08

Contributor

Johnson, Luanne, Interviewer; Editor
Morgenthaler, Gary J., Interviewee

Publisher

Computer History Museum

Place of Publication

Menlo Park, California

Extent

35 p.

Category

Transcription

Subject

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; Software business history

Collection Title

Oral history collection

Lot Number

X3654.2007