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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (63220)	11/15/1999 10:29:00 PM
From: Edwarda	Respond to of 108807

There was government funding via contract for PARC, for AT&T Bell Labs in New Jersey and Illinois, and for IBM Labs in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. As for the taking to court, that is the substance of another discussion.

To: Ilaine who wrote (63220)	11/16/1999 1:06:00 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

On this federal government funding thing... I wanted to comment but can't find any evidence to support these claims... however let me offer an opinion on the dbms industry... Larry Ellison received federal funding from some grant system somewhere (this is what I was trying to look up and can't get any info on)... to produce a non-IBM relational database. It was a sort of situation where the gov't paid all the salaries to the people doing the R&D... anyway, the existance of this $$ allowed Larry to hold on to a huge piece of Oracle himself and only get a little from the VCs. Meanwhile sybase which was ahead in some ways in the late 80s did the traditional investment approach. In 1991 or so when unix started to take off and IBM was obviously declining, Larry went out and hired every unix engineer he could get his hands on and gave them huge option grants... one staff level guy had 30K options I know... this is unheard of for a big company, staff people are lucky to get 5K. But Larry himself controlled so much of the company he did all these rogue things that Sybase was unable to do... at that moment Oracle pulled ahead and Sybase never recovered. What I am trying to figure out is whether these gov't grants for technology companies exist today... I don't think so. I know you can build things at universities and get federal money but this Oracle situation was private industry.