Artifact Details

Title

Rowe, Larry (Lawrence) oral history

Catalog Number

102702321

Type

Document

Description

Larry Rowe has had a distinguished career as a researcher, a professor, a software developer and an entrepreneur. As one of the founders of the original Ingres Corporation, Larry was a leader in database design and developing tools for ease of use. In this interview, Larry discusses his childhood as a member of a military family and the constant moving about. He describes his undergraduate days at UC Irvine and then his graduate work, also at UC Irvine. He then discusses going to UC Berkeley and working there with Mike Stonebraker and Eugene Wong, as well as other faculty members and many talented grad students. They developed what ultimately became known as Ingres, which started as an open-source, QUEL-based relational database management system. After the research project was completed, the challenge was to get Ingres into a commercially viable environment. Larry describes relationships with the venture capital firm who did the initial investing and the fierce competitive market dominated by Larry Ellison’s Oracle Corporation. Larry Rowe was later involved in several successful startup businesses and retired in 2003 from UC Berkeley. Recently, he has been President of FX Palo Alto Labs, a Fuji-Xerox research center focused on information retrieval, multimedia computing and “smart” environments.

Date

2007-11-28

Contributor

Grad, Burt, Interviewer
Miller, Stu, Editor
Rowe, Lawrence (Larry), Interviewee

Publisher

Computer History Museum

Place of Publication

Mountain View, California

Extent

48 p.

Category

Transcription

Subject

Rowe, Lawrence; ACM (Association for Computing Machinery); Butterworth, Paul; Ellison, Larry; Illustra; Ingres Corporation; Morgenthaler, Gary; multimedia; Nackerud, Jon; Oracle; POSTGRES; Stonebraker, Michael; Sutter Hill Partners; University of California, Berkeley; University of California, Irvine; Venture Capital; Wong, Gene

Collection Title

Oral history collection

Lot Number

X4361.2008