*A blog-tagging meme is, in essence, an internet chain letter without the noxious elements.

Without further ado, the Rules of the No-Fooling Meme are:

Rule 1: Post on your blog 1 or more surprisingly true things about you,* plus their explanations. I’m starting off with 10, but it’s OK to be a lot less wordy than I’m being. I suggest the following format:

• A noteworthy capsule sentence. (Example: “I was not of mortal woman born.”)
• A perfectly reasonable explanation. (Example: “I was untimely ripped from my mother’s womb. In modern parlance, she had a C-section.”)

*If you want to relax the “about you” part, that’s fine too.

Rule 2: Link back to this post. That explains what you’re doing.

Rule 3: Drop a link to your post into the comment thread. That will let people who check here know that you’ve contributed too.

Rule 4: Ping 1 or more other people encouraging them to join in the meme with posts of their own.

Hopefully, the end result of all this will be that we all know each other just a little bit better! And hopefully we’ll preserve some cool stories as well.

To kick it off, here are my entries. (Please pardon any implied boastfulness; a certain combustibility aside, I’ve lived a pretty fortunate life.)

I was physically evicted by hotel security from a DBMS vendor’s product announcement venue. It was the Plaza Hotel in NYC, at Cullinet’s IDMS/R announcement. Phil Cooper, then Cullinet’s marketing VP, blocked my entrance to the ballroom for the main event, and then called hotel security to have me removed from the premises.

A few years later, the same Phil Cooper stood me up for a breakfast meeting in his own house in Wellesley. When one’s around Phil Cooper, weird things just naturally happen.

I got James Marsters (”Spike” on Buffy the Vampire Slayer) to autograph a shirtless picture of himself. Linda was a very serious Buffy fan, and I was no slouch in that regard myself. So we flew out to Santa Barbara to join some acquaintances from a Buffy-centric mailing list. Except first, we went – along with the hostess for the gathering – to see James perform with his rock band Ghost of the Robot in Santa Monica. She had downloaded a photo she wanted to pass out to the other (mostly female) attendees. But neither she nor Linda wanted to actually ask him to autograph it – too fangirlish or something. So I stepped up and made the request in their place. (Technically, asking James to sign anything other than a Ghost of the Robot CD was against the rules – but he was more than gracious when I said that if he signed for me it would be a great help to my relationship. )

I had (inter)national reputations in four different fields before my 24th birthday – two academic, two non-academic. I got my PhD in game theory, independently proving a theorem that was simultaneously (and a few months earlier) proved by Mertens and Neyman. Naturally, the game theory community was quite aware of my work. Then I did a post-doc in public policy for a couple of years. Some of my work – sort of a public-sector version of real options analysis, although unfortunately I wasn’t familiar with that concept – was widely circulated among the US utility regulation community. Then, at age 21, I went to Wall Street, as a stock analyst covering the software industry for a major firm (PaineWebber). That pretty much assured me of being known in both the investment and software businesses, especially as I soon got pretty high in the third-party stock analyst rankings.

Graduating college at age 16 cost me my NCAA eligibility – and I wound up regretting that aspect. On the whole, I’m hardly an athlete. But I did take a few fencing classes, and enjoyed them. So when my grad school offered an intermediate intramural fencing class, I was psyched. But when I went the first day, they explained that they didn’t have the resources to offer the class. Instead, anybody who wanted to could join and hence work out with the Harvard fencing team, whether or not they were good enough to compete. Only they couldn’t do that for me – because my NCAA eligibility had been shot when I graduated from Ohio State.

I double-dated with Larry Ellison, twice. Part of the explanation is that when I lived in Manhattan, I had almost no friends there, but quite a few in the SF Bay area. (Seriously, which kind of work acquaintances would you expect me to have more in common with – tech entrepreneurs or Wall Street professionals?) So if I wanted to introduce a new girlfriend to my friends, we’d fly out west. And if there’s one company at which I had a lot of friends, it was Oracle, which I’d first visited in 1983, when it was still located at 3000 Sand Hill Road and had fewer than 50 employees. I was very engaged with Oracle professionally through most of the 1990s – but we also got together just for fun.

I was the top-rated chess player my age in the United States. This is when I was 13 years old, in 1973. But I wasn’t nearly as good as that factoid suggests. 1973 may have been the weakest year for 13-year-old US chess players in modern times; I made #1 with only a 1650 rating. (To put that number in context, it indicates that this 2300+ rated 13-year-old could have routinely obliterated players who could, in turn, have routinely obliterated me.) More on the story may be found at this link.

I told people at a conference “I just spent the afternoon with Bill Gates’ girlfriend — and boy is my butt sore!” This was in 1985 or so. I was a stock analyst living in NYC. The annual American Electronics Association investment conference in Monterey was a must-attend event. Flight connections, however, were imperfect. So Ann Winblad had the idea that, during my several-hour layover, she’d pick me up at SFO, and we’d go drive around the mini race track that’s still there off of 101. I got pretty sore bouncing around in the little plastic cars, perhaps because I wasn’t a very experienced driver. Indeed …

… I didn’t own (or lease) a car until I was 36 years old. (To readers from California, this one may sound the oddest of all. ) I left home at age 16 to go to school in Cambridge, MA, where one doesn’t typically have a car. I left there at age 21 to move to Manhattan. Finally, when I was 36, I left Manhattan for Lexington, MA, at which point I of course got wheels. That Toyota served me well for about a decade, but eventually …

… my first car forced a DBMS vendor to evacuate its whole office building. My Toyota Camry had an engine fire in Intersystems’ building on Memorial Drive, and the building has indoor parking. The story is here. Actually, many other companies had to evacuate the same building.

My kitchen caught on fire, just as I was Twittering with LeVar Burton of Star Trek:TNG and Roots fame. That juxtaposition was a total coincidence. LeVar had just tweeted me his vehement agreement to something I said, when Linda appeared at my office door, having noticed the sound of what turned out to be a fire on the stove. This story has been the subject of several other blog posts …

By the way, what I’d said was, after LeVar tweeted his pleasure at for once actually acting again (on stage, no less), that we choose our original professions for a reason – taking them up again, even for a little while, is like going home again. Even today, I rarely feel more right than when I’m doing mathematics.

Britton-Lee, which I first visited in 1983, basically had a very early client/server system, based on a handful of Z80s (Zilog’s Z80 was a technically worthy competitor to Intel’s microprocessor family, back before it was obvious Intel would conquer the world). Bob Epstein, previously head of the Ingres project and later CTO of Sybase, was involved. Britton-Lee also owned an unrelated software vendor named Altergo, as some kind of financial play. (For a company that at various times had both Richard Currier and Vaughan Merlyn working there, Altergo never amounted to much. Of course, Richard was long gone by the Britton-Lee days.) Fine entrepreneurs though they no doubt were, neither Dave Britton nor Geoff Lee really seemed to quite fit the enterprise software or hardware CEO mode, and the whole thing never really achieved ignition.

Teradata may have come more out of the Tandem tradition, via Citibank. (Teradata’s official company history credits CalTech but not Tandem.) I first visited Teradata in 1984 (when they started shipping product), meeting Chief Scientist Phil Neches.and a CEO out of Amdahl in whose office I saw golf tournament trophies for the first time in my life. Cocky young stock analyst that I was, grilled them about their lack of support for standard tools, such as SQL (they were a QUEL shop) or fourth-generation languages. I distinctly remember going to a blackboard or white board (I forget the detail as to which), and holding forth about the features of a competitive 4GL, with Phil taking copious notes. The basic product architecture in those days was a tree of microprocessors (I think Intel 8086s), with each parent node talking to two children, until it got down to the lowest-level nodes that actually talked to disk. (This is what was called Ynet.) The architecture meant that almost exactly half the microprocessors talked to disk, and 50% wasn’t necessarily bad overhead at all.

And that’s most of what I recall about database machines or data warehouse appliances before the mid-1990s, so I’ll stop right there.

The company was originally started by John Cullinane and Larry English in 1968 as Cullinane Corporation. Their idea was to sell pre-packaged software to mainframe users, which was at that time a new concept in an era when enterprises only used internally developed applications or the software that came bundled with the hardware.

Actually, Applied Data Research got there first.

Rather than write its own products, Cullinane approached IT departments of major enterprises, particularly banks, to identify internally developed applications that he felt had potential to be productized and licensed to others. However, it proved difficult to sell these applications because most weren’t generalized and supportable systems. As a result, the company had to create its own utility packages. The first was a tape based source code management system, TMS, that competed with Pansophic’s (PanDA) and UCC’s products (UCC-1) in the space. TMS had the handicap of being “tape” and not “disk” based so it was never successful. The first breakthrough product was a report writer named Culprit, actually developed in-house by Gil Curtice and Anna Marie Thron, who had built the PHI payroll system. The product competed with Mark IV from Informatics but was perceived as a late entry in the report writer category.

I don’t know about those details one way or the other, actually.

The company struggled with financial stability until it branded a variation of Culprit, EDP Auditor, which was nothing more than a second name for the same product with a collection of predefined reports, but more importantly, special services aimed at the new discipline of EDP Auditing including the first EDP Auditors User, special support to give auditors independence of data processing which was very important to them. What was remarkable is that many corporations licensed essentially identical products. This led to serendipitous prosperity for Cullinane. As EDP auditors developed knowledge about business systems and computers, they could invariably produce reports faster than slower-moving internal IT departments. As a result, MIS departments would feel compelled to buy the Culprit version for their own use — to compete.

Also not unreasonable, and also before my time.

As the company prospered in the early ’70s it was approached by a consultant to BFGoodrich, Naomi O. Seligman, to consider taking over development of a Honeywell database management system called IDS that had been modified to operate on IBM and IBM compatible (RCA) mainframes. Actually IDS was originally developed by General Electric, and a Bill Curtis had supposedly gotten the rights to convert the system to run on IBM equipment.

First I heard of those individuals’ involvement.

The decision was made in early 1973 — primarily by John Cullinane, Jim Baker and Tom Muerer — to bet the company on the effort. Several executives joined the effort over the next three years, including Andrew Filipowski, Robert Goldman, Jon Nackerud, Ron McKinney, William Casey, Bob Davis, Bill Linn, and Ray Nawara.

Shortly after I became an analyst in 1981, the Cullinane folks bragged to me about their low turnover. John Maguire of Software AG promptly put me on the phone with a Cullinane ex-pat named Grant Osasa, who in turn told me of four VPs who left around the time of Cullinane’s IPO — Flip Filipowski, Jon Nackerud, Tom Muerer, and I think Bill Casey. Flip went on to found DBMS, Inc. with Ray Nawara, which led to a bitter breakup of their partnership. Of course, he bounced back amazingly successfully with Platinum Software. Flip’s version of his departure from Cullinane — not really contradicted by anything John Cullinane told me — is that he rose from being the first salesman to EVP, and was essentially running the company while John was out doing the IPO. When John returned to to more hands-on management, it was time for Flip to leave.

IDMS was to be a great bet for the company as it became the leader among many capable and popular products of the mainframe era. It competed with Cincom’s Total, Software AG’s ADABAS, Applied Data Research’s DATACOM/DB, Computer Corporation of America’s Model 204, MRI (later Intel’s) System 2000 and IBM’s IMS & DL/1.^[2]

Good list.

John Cullinane mentored a series of future entrepreneurs and software industry executives. One of the early executives was Andrew ‘Flip’ Filipowski, who later founded Platinum Technology, Inc.. Another was Robert Goldman who became the CEO of several public software companies including AICorp.

I don’t recall Bob Goldman having actually been CEO of natural language pioneer Artificial Intelligence Corporation, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t. He definitely was CEO of Trinzic, the company formed by merging AICorp and expert-system shell vendor Aion. He also ran Object Design, which merged into Excelon in a financial play; Excelon was eventually bought by Progress Software.

Jon Nackerud was a co-founder of Relational Technology, Inc., formed to commercialize the Ingres database management system. Prior to becoming a public company in 1978 the company’s name was changed to Cullinane Database Systems, Inc. The company changed its name again to Cullinet Software in 1983, partly because John Cullinane wanted to distance his name from the personal connection to the business when he turned the company over to Bob Goldman, and also in a nod to the importance of computer networking. Joe McNay, a board member, was particularly important regarding the company’s IPO, the first ever in the software products industry. Of note is that Greylock purchased some shares from John Cullinane in 1977 less than a year before the company was to go public. It was to be the early foundation on which their Greylock’s software technology investment prowess rested. It was Greylock’s first investment in a software company.

Just to be clear, Joe McNay was at an outfit called Essex. He wasn’t affiliated with Greylock, where the key guy was Henry McCance.

Cullinane’s public offering was of note as it was the first successful offering of a pure software products company ever and the first software company Hambrecht & Quist ever took public. Cullinet was also the first software company to have a billion dollar valuation, and the first to do a Super Bowl ad. Specifically, Cullinane Database Systems, Inc., went public in 1978. On April 27, 1982 the company became the first computer software firm to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange and later, the first to become a component stock of the S&P 500 Index.

There always are definitional debates, but those claims are not unrealistic. On the other hand — the way it was executed, that Super Bowl ad was not exactly anything to be proud of …

However, two quarters after the company went public IBM introduced its 4300 series. Its salesmen told all mutual clients that IDMS didn’t run on the 4300 series and that all IBM software of the future would be built with IMS/DL1. This caused a major problem as every IDMS customer went ballistic and every prospect went on hold. The company only had three months to solve this marketing problem, and technical problem, and remarkably, they did. Technically, it only required the modification of one instruction to get IDMS running on a 4300.

Obviously hyperbolic.

The solution to the company’s revenue problem turned out to be its new Integrated Data Dictionary. By moving very fast, the company used it to put IBM on the defensive and made its numbers, no small accomplishment. It then went from winning one out five competitions to winning four out five and this fueled its growth.

Beginning in 1979, in an attempt to promote less dependence on the database sales alone, Cullinane fully integrated financial and manufacturing applications with IDMS and decision support systems, another first. The company acquired financial applications from McCormick and Dodge, and completely rewrote them using IDMS. They also acquired an MRP system from Rath & Strong and completely rewrote it using IDMS. Thus, Cullinet had a suite of integrated financial and manufacturing systems, the first on-line database driven applications, and was a major competitor in what is now called ERP. The company had become a software power house. Eventually, it acquired a small Boston-based company called Computer Pictures whose graphics-focused decision support system had already been integrated with IDMS and was very successful. This team developed Goldengate, a Lotus Symphony-like PC product.

Lots of inaccuracies there. If memory serves, IDD was earlier than suggested in that passage, and the apps were later. Computer Pictures hadn’t sold much of anything before Cullinane acquired them.

Goldengate was a part of Cullinet’s flawed ICMS (Information Center Management System). The promise of ICMS was the ability to move data between the mainframe and PC desktop. Apple Computer was supposed to do the same for the Apple Lisa, but never delivered. ICMS was unveiled in 1983 as part of a splashy 20+ city closed circuit TV broadcast that focused on IDMS/R and fueled the market for Cullinet for the next two years, but it was obvious that it was getting harder to maintain its unbroken string of quarters with sales and earnings in excess of 50%.

IBM had introduced the term “Information Center.” The idea was pretty much the same as that of today’s data warehouses — keep two copies of the data, one for transactional update and one for analytics. But IDMS’ CODASYL/network/linked-list architecture wasn’t at all well-suited for analytics, so this wasn’t an area of strength.

That said, Steve Jobs did do a cool video for them in connection with the partnership, banging on a washing machine-sized disk drive to show his frustration at the difficulty of getting data out.

Goldengate was a mistake. The company should have developed PC based IDMS development tools, instead. Ironically, it had the technology under development which was later to become the foundation of PowerBuilder at Powersoft. In fairness many failures mark the landscape in that space and era including the infamous Ovation product introduced with great fanfare by Ovation Corporation in a race with Lotus’s Symphony suite attempting to create the early office suites now dominated by Microsoft Corp. Goldengate’s other flaw was that it was built pre-Windows which was expensive for Cullinet because of all the permutations and combinations of PC hardware and memory configurations.

That’s pretty confused. For example, Powerbuilder was an inherently Windows-based, client/server product. But it is true that the Powerbuilder team started out at Cullinet, before finding a home at Mitchell Kertzman’s company.

In 1983 John Cullinane, after 25 years in the software business, handed over the helm of Cullinet to Bob Goldman while he began to pursue other interests. Things continued to go well but eventually the company ran into trouble and Cullinane brought in a recent acquaintance, David Chapman, as CEO of the company. At the time, Cullinet had some $50,000,000 in cash reserves. David Chapman, a veteran IBM and Data General executive, started an aggressive campaign to acquire technology from other companies. The reason for bringing in Chapman was that the company had got hung up on the open architecture and relational issues. In other words, a company with an unparalleled record of outpositioning competition every two years, for sixteen years, including IBM, allowed itself to get outpositioned by IBM, and others, with the help of E. F. Codd and C.J. Date. This was the company’s fault, not theirs.

In 1986-87, David Chapman attempted to move the company to the more and more powerful minicomputers such as Digital Equipment Corporation’s VAX line of computers. In the process, Cullinet acquired some very questionable VAX companies but one had an outstanding relational DBMS but by then it was too late, the company’s $50 million nest egg had been burned.

In 1988, John Cullinane returned to Cullinet, fired David Chapman, and tried to salvage the company. By repositioning the company’s product line with a new product called Enterprise Generator, he solved the open architecture problem and the company was able to return to profitability by the fourth quarter. This made it possible to negotiate a deal with Charles Wang and Computer Associates.

In 1989, Charles bought the company for $330,000,000 in stock. It was a good deal for investors because the CA shares increased in value ten times.

Actually, Cullinet was already losing share to ADR (and others, but especially ADR) due to pre-relational product architecture issues. (Most of the competitors had inverted-list architectures, and these were more flexible than Cullinet’s network structure.) That said, Cullinet was still holding its own until IBM introduced DB2, and Computerworld ran Codd’s criteria for defining a relational DBMS. At that point, the bottom dropped out of all the independent mainframe DBMS vendors’ markets. In one quarter shortly before it was acquired, Cullinet got exactly two new-name accounts. I was told this by John Landry and Bob Weiler, who ran the company before it was acquired, after their little company Distribution Management Systems (DMS) was acquired by Cullinet.

• Most early packaged software companies were hybrids, offering both packaged products and professional services (including services unrelated to the packaged products).
• Applied Data Research, led by Martin “Marty” Goetz, is the clear innovator in third-party packaged software. Not only is ADR’s Autoflow the generally acknowledged first packaged software product from an independent company (”independent” as opposed to, say, IBM), but ADR was a leader in legal and political anti-trust action to gain market space to sell against IBM.
• If you use the term “application” narrowly — so that anything whose main function was to help manage IT shops and activities is “system software” rather than “application” — there’s no way Cullinane was an early leader. Think instead of American Software, MSA, McCormack & Dodge, or several specialists in regulated verticals such as banking and insurance. But if you use the term “application” loosely, ADR gets priority as noted above.
• The credit Cullinane usually gets for leading the way in software company success (e.g., first IPO of a product company) is absolutely justified.

Cincom. In the 1970s, Cincom was probably the most successful independent software product company. Its flagship product was Total, a shallow-network DBMS that was a little more general than the strictly hierarchical IMS. What’s more, Total ran on almost any brand of computer hardware. Cincom remains independent and privately held to this day.

Cullinane/Cullinet. Charlie Bachman innovated a true network DBMS at Honeywell, but it didn’t turn into a serious product at that time. B. F. Goodrich, however, ran a version. This is what John Cullinane’s company bought and turned into IDMS, which at least on the mainframe supplanted Total as the technical, mind share, and probably revenue market leader. Cullinet (as it was then called) ran into technical difficulties, however, losing ground to the more flexible index-based DBMS. It was eventually sold to Computer Associates.

A lot of software industry leaders cut their teeth at Cullinet, notably Andrew “Flip” Filipowski, later the colorful founder of Platinum. Other alumni include Renato “Ron” Zambonini, Dave Litwack, Dave Ireland, and the original PowerBuilder development team. John Landry and Bob Weiler ran the firm for a while toward the end, but they don’t really count; rather, they’re the most prominent alumni of applications pioneer McCormack & Dodge.

Note: Index-based is a term I used in and probably coined for my first report in 1982, comprising both inverted-list and relational RDBMS, as opposed to the link(ed)-list hierarchical and network products such as IMS, Total, and IDBMS. The companies that beat Cullinet were long-time rival Software AG, and then especially Applied Data Research; then all three of those independents were blown out by IBM’s DB2. And then the whole mainframe DBMS business was in turn obsoleted by the rise of UNIX … but I’m getting ahead of my story.

Software AG. Like Cincom, Germany-based Software AG is a 1970s DBMS pioneer that has always remained independent and privately held. Sort of. Twice, Software AG of North America was spun off as a separate, eventually public company. Software AG’s flagship DBMS was the inverted list product ADABAS. SAP’s MaxDB was also owned by Software AG for a while (and seemingly by every other significant German computer company as well – or more precisely, by Nixdorf where it was developed, and by Siemens after it bought Nixdorf).

I actually visited Software AG in Darmstadt once. Founder Peter Schnell and key techie Peter Page were both gracious hosts. Schnell was proud of their new building, and especially of the hexagon-based wooden dual desks he’d personally designed. General analytic rule – when the CEO is focused on the décor, this is not a good sign for the company’s near-term prospects. (I call this having an “edifice complex.”)

Applied Data Research (ADR). ADR is often credited as being the first independent software company, having introduced products in the late 1960s and prevailed in antitrust struggles against IBM to allow the business to survive. Basically, it sold programmer productivity tools. This led it to acquire Datacom/DB, an inverted-list DBMS developed in the Dallas area. In the early 1980s, Datacom/DB began to boom, and was on a track to surpass both IDMS and ADABAS in market share until DB2 showed up and blew them all away. ADR was particularly aided by its fourth-generation language (4GL) IDEAL, which was an excellent product notwithstanding the famous State of New Jersey fiasco. (As John Landry said to me about that one, “4GLs are powerful tools. In particular, they allow you to write bad programs really quickly.”)

ADR was an underappreciated powerhouse, boasting all of the Fortune 100 as customers way back in the early 1980s (yes, even archrival IBM). When the DBMS business stalled, however, ADR was quickly sold — first to Ameritech (the Illinois-based Baby Bell company), and soon thereafter to Computer Associates.

Computer Corporation of America (CCA). CCA’s DBMS Model 204 may have been the best of the prerelational products, boasting an inverted-list architecture akin to that of ADABAS and Datacom/DB. The company was also interesting in that it was first and foremost a government contract research shop, and hence did all sorts of interesting prototype work that sadly never got commercialized. In about 1983 it became that the company wasn’t going anywhere, and it put itself up for sale.

I was personally instrumental in that decision. Our investment banker pretended he was considering taking CCA public. CCA President Jim Rothnie showed us revenue projections. I asked how he had gotten them. He replied that he had taken the market size projection 5 years out, assumed 10%, and drawn a “plausible curve.” However, I quickly got Socratic with him. “How many salesmen do you have?” “How much revenue does the average experienced salesman produce?” “How many experienced salesmen do you expect to have next year?” “How high do you think their average productivity can grow?” “Let us multiply.” (Yes, I really said that. I can be a jerk. And anyway Jim was the sort of analytic guy one can say that to without giving serious offense.)

CCA was sold to a Canadian insurance company whose name I’ve now forgotten. Eventually, it was spun back out (perhaps after some intermediate changes of ownership), and resurfaced as primarily a data integration company, called Praxis.

In the real old days (mid 1970s, perhaps), Model 204 was resold by Informatics (later Informatics General, later the hostile takeover that became the guts of Sterling Software, which like so many other companies was eventually absorbed into Computer Associates). I know this because Richard Currier used to sell the product when he worked at Informatics. That probably makes Richard and me about the only two people who still remember the fact.

Hmm. I forgot to mention Intel’s System 2000. Well, truth be told it was a dying product even back when I first became an analyst in 1981, and I recall nothing about it, except Gene Lowenthal’s observation that Intel had had trouble selling chips and DBMS through the same salesforce. I think Al Sisto, who I probably met when he was head of sales at RTI (Relational Technology, Inc. — later called Ingres), came out of that business, but I’m not 100% sure. I remember Pete Tierney from that RTI management team more clearly anyway, although that’s mainly because we stayed in touch at subsequent companies over the years.