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To: Mark Finger who wrote (10134)	4/1/1998 10:13:00 AM
From: frank doolittle	Respond to of 14631

Tomorrow Oracle is going to have a press conference, accordingly they are "probably" going to have some good news. I don't know if I believe that or not. If they do I hope it concerns databases.

To: Mark Finger who wrote (10134)	4/1/1998 11:25:00 AM
From: seth thomas	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14631

Man, this goes way back to the very early 1980's. The original name of the product was Marathon - and it was a report writer that could sit on top of flat files (I think that's right). Roger and the other founders were working for a long defunct UNIX hardware company called Cromemco. Interesting note: Cromemco came from the name of the dormitory at Stanford where those founders lived (didn't include Roger). The dorm was called Crothers Memorial Hall, and of course, the cool people who lived in it called it CroMem. Hence, Cromemco. Anyway, Roger wanted to get Cromemco to get into the report writer business, which they didn't want to do. So, Roger and some founders spun off a company to build Marathon. I forget the original name of the company at that time. Then, it became clear that RDBMS would be a good business, so they evolved the Marathon business into RDS - Relational Database Systems. By the time I got to the company, the early versions of Informix were already shipping - pre-SQL, in fact. Around 1985 the company changed the name to Informix - partially to take advantage of the Informix branding (except no one called it branding then) and also because of occasional market confusion with RTI - Relational Technology, Inc. who had the Ingres product. Boy, just another bit of name trivia - I remember just as we were coming out with Informix-Turbo, Roger saw the Tom Cruise movie "Top Gun", in which there's a lot of talk about going "ballistic". Roger came in one morning totally psyched about the movie, and wanted to change the name of the product to "Ballistic" or Informix-Ballistic, or something else that would capitalize on that term. A bunch of us spent hours trying to talk him out of the idea (I guess it was successful). Man, those were fun days. We were just kids in our 20's. Anyone else wants to hear more war stories, from the earliest days, you just let me know. Anyone out there remember Skip Hawk?