Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Cullinane
Cullinane was formed in 1968 by John Cullinane and Larry English. It was located
in Westwood, Massachusetts. The company is cited in this chapter because it went
public in the 1970s.
The Cullinane IPO was the first for a pure software company. It was also the
first IPO handled by Hambrecht and Quist, who would later handle many others.
It was also the first software IPO where a software company was valued at more
than a billion dollars. Later, Cullinane became the first software company to run
an ad during a Super Bowl.
The main software applications for Cullinane were in the database management
area; its Integrated Data Base Management System (IDMS) was its main database
product. This competed successfully with several others, including IBM's Inform-
ation Management System (IMS). IDMS was based on the CODASYL data model
and would eventually lose ground to relational databases.
In 1982, IBM announced the 4300 series of computers and told clients that the
Cullinane IDMS database product would not run on the 4300, so IMS was the only
choice. Unfortunately for IBM, it turned out that Cullinane was able to port IDMS
to the 4300 series by changing only one single instruction! This, of course, embar-
rassed IBM and put them on the defensive.
After many ups and downs, Cullinane (whose name was changed to Cullinet)
was acquired by CA in 1989.
During the 1970s and 1980s, database products were a fairly hot component
of the software market space, and many companies and products entered the mar-
ket. Database applications remain important today. Among the numerous database
applications and query methods are Access, dBASE, DB2, Easytrieve, Filemaker,
FoxPro, IDMS, IMS, Informix, Ingres, MySQL, Oracle, Sybase, and many more.
Database technology is also a hot pure research topic, and at least a dozen nav-
igation models have surfaced, including sequential, CODASYL, relational, entity-
relationship, and many more. This topic only deals with a few surface issues, but
the database literature is large and has many excellent sources.
Digital Research
The company now known as Digital Research was founded by Dr. Gary Kildall
and his wife, Dorothy, under the name Intergalactic Digital Research in 1976 in
Pacific Grove, California.
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