Item Details

Description

The Gary Morgenthaler collection next hit consists mainly of administrative and financial records related to Relational Technology, Inc., a company Morgenthaler co-founded in 1980 and of which he was CEO and chairman until 1989, when the company changed its name to Ingres Corporation. The bulk of the Relational Technology, Inc. material in the collection spans 1980 through 1990, and includes business plans and overviews, stock and investment records, financial reports, board meeting minutes and reports, promotional material, and human resources records. A very small portion of the collection relates to the company after its 1989 name change. Of note are product development notes and several reports that analyze the company's competition. Two folders in this collection document other companies Morgenthaler was associated with, Tymshare and Informix. The Tymshare records document the company from 1970 to 1977, while the Informix records focus on problems the company had financially and legally from 1997 to 2000, after Morgenthaler sold his company Illustra Information Technology to them in 1996. This collection also includes books and manuals about relational technology, several of which are INGRES database user manuals. Also included are manuals for other relational databases and languages, plus books about technology and business in general. Biographical/Historical Note Gary Morgenthaler was born in Erie, Pennsylvania on July 10, 1948. He attended college at Harvard University and received a BA in International Studies in 1970. After finishing at Harvard, Morgenthaler moved to California in 1970 and worked at Stanford University teaching and doing data analysis for Stanford's Institute for Math Studies in the Social Sciences. In 1973, Morgenthaler left Stanford and began work primarily as an operating systems designer at Tymshare, Inc., a company that provided popular timesharing services and third-party hardware maintenance. Gary Morgenthaler co-founded Relational Technology, Inc. (later renamed Ingres Corporation) with Michael Stonebraker, Eugene Wong, and Lawrence A. Rowe in November of 1980, launching one of the earliest commercially supported, open-source SQL relational database management systems. Relational Technology, Inc.'s commercial version of Ingres grew out of a research project at the University of California, Berkeley. Stonebraker and Wong initiated this project in the mid 1970s, which they called University INGRES (for INteractive Graphics REtrieval System) in its early stages. Morgenthaler joined them in 1980 and was integral in securing the funding to create commercial products from the University INGRES prototype and building the company which would sell those products, Relational Technology, Inc. (RTI). Throughout the early 1980s, RTI and Oracle competed as the leading hardware-independent relational database management systems (RDBMs). Morgenthaler became a key figure in RTI's success and began as its chief executive officer in 1983. In 1989 RTI changed its name to Ingres Corporation, and in 1990 the company was purchased by ASK Corporation. Morgenthaler left Ingres when it was purchased and started work as a venture capitalist, setting up the West Coast office of Morgenthaler Ventures, an investment firm founded by his father, David Morgenthaler, in Cleveland, Ohio. Gary Morgenthaler still works as a Partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, specializing in information technology investments.

Level of description

Folder

Date

1970-2000, 1980-1990

Publisher

Computer History Museum (Publisher)

Extent

3.75 linear feet in 3 record cartons

Subject

Informix Software, Ingres Corporation, Tymshare, Inc.

Collection title

Gary Morgenthaler collection

Credit

Gift of Gary Morgenthaler

Catalogue number

102733952

Lot number

X3708.2007