Anyhow, I ran across the following concise info, from a January, 2003 web page posted by (who else?) Jeff Jones:

A series of research projects have been a steady source of technology for the DB2 family since the beginning:

• The System R project resulted in the first IBM implementation of the relational model. A project called ARIES delivered row-level locking technology used throughout the database industry today.
• Cost-based query optimization has been an area of intense effort and innovation ever since the System R days. The R Star project extended the relational model to distributed system environments.
• The Starburst project focused on making the relational model extensible to handle new forms of information and new kinds of optimization strategies.
• The Garlic project brought an emphasis on data federation, allowing data in diverse systems, not just DB2 systems, to be managed together.
• Most recently, a technical preview based on DB2 has demonstrated the integration of information from Web services and the use of XQuery as an additional and powerful query language for managing XML content.

The first implementation of relational technologies from the initial System R project was the database integrated into the System/38 server in 1980. In 1982, the SQL/DS^TM product was delivered on the mainframe operating systems VM and VSE, also based on System R. DB2, formally called DATABASE 2, was born in 1983 on MVS^TM. The database manager in OS/2® Extended Edition in 1987 was the first relational database on distributed systems. SQL/400® for the new AS/400® server emerged in 1988. New DB2 editions were delivered on AIX® (1993), HP-UX and Solaris (1994), Windows® (1995), and Linux (1999).

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.

We’re not doing this because we want to — it’s a nice theme, but we have a nicer one yet under development. Rather, this change is necessitated by an emergency upgrade to from WordPress 2.13 to 2.5, which our old and no longer supported theme can’t be counted on to handle.

If you’re reading here, you’re not affected by the emergency (except in that it caused the upgrade). Rather, the problem is that I got a de-indexing notice from Google this afternoon for DBMS2. Clearly, until fixed this will lower the number of new people who read our research. And why did I get the notice? Because there were 20-40K of hidden spammy links injected into Line 23 of the index.php file on DBMS2, Text Technologies, and Software Memories.

And I do mean “injected.” I deleted the code by hand, and naively applied for re-inclusion to Google — whereupon Melissa Bradshaw discovered it was back the next morning. The working diagnosis is SQL injection bug.

What this means to you is mainly that there will be an immediate look-and-feel change, followed by a second one as soon as we can get our development act together. And because the roll-out is hasty … well, everybody who reads this should know enough about software development to be able to complete that sentence for themselves. Please let me know of any issues, whether via post comments, email, AIM, or carrier pigeon.

*SAP was founded around the same time, but didn’t become particularly influential until later on.

Actually, there were two important Software AGs – the parent company in Darmstadt, Germany, and the North American distributor Software AG of North America. SAGNA, in Reston, Virginia, was run by John Maguire, of whom many stories are told. It is said that he once pulled over to help a man change a flat tire on his car and wound up selling him a copy of ADABAS. It is said that he used to stroll by Cullinane booths at trade shows and pronounce “I’m John Norris Maguire, and I’m going to bury you.” And while I can’t exactly confirm these stories – I knew the guy, and I find them all to be eminently plausible. (Sadly, John died young, not long after selling SAGNA back to the Darmstadt company and buying himself a 44-foot powerboat.)

ADABAS was an excellent product – one of the three major inverted-list DBMS, the other two being Computer Corporation of America’s Model 204 and ADR’s Datacom/DB. Natural was also one of the top 4GLs. At the time I judged that ADR’s Datacom/IDEAL combo had slightly surpassed ADABAS/Natural. 20-some-odd years later, ADABAS seems to have the significantly more vibrant of the two product suites’ surviving customer bases, but I think that has much more to do with the products’ subsequent owners than with their technical or market situations back in 1983.

As was the case for most of the early software vendors, some major talent passed through Software AG. Richard Currier may now claim a lot more credit for a book project he wrote a chapter for than he actually deserves, but he’s also one of the great marketing minds from the early part of the software industry. (He also ignited my passion for software industry anecdotes and industry, and hence may be regarded as a kind of absentee grandfather of this blog.) Bob Preger went from being the second salesman at Software AG to being the first at Oracle.

I visited Darmstadt once, and honchos Peter Schnell (founder and ADABAS designer) and Peter Page (Natural designer). It was soon after they’d moved into a new building, and Peter Schnell was very proud of the hexagon-based oak desks he’d personally designed for programmers to work at. I came away thinking this was an example of Edifice Complex, not to mention micromanagement, and in retrospect I seem to have been right.

After DB2 blew the other mainframe DBMS out of the water, things got choppy for Software AG. SAGNA was bought by Darmstadt, then spun out and taken public again, then bought again. The company came out with ADABAS-D and Tamino, neither of which was a great success. Even so, it’s still alive, kicking, and even growing, something which can be said for very few of the other leading software firms of its day. Indeed, I just posted a long Software AG update over on DBMS2, my blog about current-day DBMS and related technologies.

Either way, it’s been established that Howard and his colleagues were several decades late; the term was first coined no later than the late 1950s. Whether anybody much used it in the interim is, of course, quite a different matter: I recall terms like decision support and executive information systems (EIS), but not “business intelligence” before the time frame in which Howard claims to have (re)introduced it.

By the way — that “Monash BI” link is NOT to anything I wrote. It’s something associated with Monash University, on the other side of the planet.

• 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.

Tom Evslin has several posts about meetings with Microsoft and so on. It all jibes with my perceptions of the company in the same era.

Who was the original fictitious Rob Carpenter?