Title
Durbin, Gary oral history
Catalog Number
102702137
Type
Document
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.
Date
2000-05-17
Contributor
|
Durbin, Gary, Interviewee
|
|
Johnson, Luanne, Interviewer; Editor
|
Publisher
Computer History Museum
Place of Publication
Oakland, California
Extent
26 p.
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 history collection
