Title:
Oral History of Gary Morgenthaler

Date:
2005-12-08

Pages:
35 p.

Interviewer:
Johnson, Luanne; interviewer
Morgenthaler, Gary; interviewee
Johnson, Luanne; editor

Abstract:
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.

Keywords:
Morgenthaler, Gary
Ingres Corporation
INGRES
Morgenthaler Ventures
Institute for Math Studies in the Social Sciences
Tymshare
Demand paging
TYMCOM-10
DEC System 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
Morgenthaler, David

Rights:
Computer History Museum

102658005