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Summary: This sheet provides a summary of my recent article about the 20 year history of Informix, featuring an interview with co-founder Roger Sippl and additional input from co-founder Laura King. The article includes information about how Informix started and how its products evolved. It also includes interesting stories from the founders. The complete article can be found at www.InformixHandbook.com. During the user conference on Friday at 4:30, Roger will talk about his memories.

- Ron Flannery, lead author, Informix Handbook

Article highlights:

Actually, Roger and Laura found ME when they discovered that one of my book’s chapters included a lot of folklore about them. Chapter 2, "History of Informix: Live from Silicon Valley" presents a highly entertaining view of the roots of Informix, as told by long-time employee Tom Houston… Tom wrote:

"This chapter outlines the technological history of Informix, which fulfilled the Silicon Valley dream of a tiny start-up software company becoming a multi-million-dollar corporation. This account has been assembled partly from the marketing materials and annual reports of that corporation, but mostly from the corporate folklore and myths that persist in the recollections of men and women who worked there as engineers in the early years.

…

Northern California in the late 1970s had three elements need to stimulate the rise of independent database software publishing companies:

• an academically trained labor force skilled in UNIX and C
• access to the developers of the relational model and of SQL
• proximity to the early manufacturers of mini- and micro-computers

Interview excerpts:

RON: What about this rumor that Steve Jobs interviewed at Informix? What really happened?

ROGER: The story said that Jobs interviewed with us, but it was the other way around. I interviewed at Apple in 1997. I think that was the root of the erroneous story. I actually interviewed with Steve Jobs, but I had problems. For one thing, I wore a suit because I came straight from downtown San Francisco, where I was still consulting for Bechtel. I don’t think that worked for him, culturally. More importantly, he was looking for 6502 Assembly Language programmers and I didn’t know that instruction set. Finally, I didn’t like low level languages at all and my intentions of bringing business-class, higher level languages just didn’t fit at Apple. Thus, I did not get the job.

RON: So what led you to create your new company (later to become Informix)?

ROGER: At Cromemco, Laura and I designed a report writer and data entry facility that turned out also to be a relational database system. This helped us realize what a relational database system could do. Shortly after that, Cromemco wanted a multi-user operating system, and I suggested UNIX. Harry Garland and Roger Melen investigated the UNIX option, but decided against it. Eventually Roy Harrington wrote a smaller UNIX clone, Cromix, which ran on the Z80 eight bit processor.

I felt my DBMS products needed more than the 64K bytes of memory that the Z80 could address, so I asked Harry and Roger to allow me to start a company based on my designs. They generously licensed these designs to me, and allowed me to hire Laura. We implemented these products on 16 and 32 bit microprocessor-based machines that ran UNIX. Bill Hedge joined us to implement the Ace report writer, and later Roy Harrington joined us to do handle operations. Finally, Bob Macdonald came along to sell it and market the products.

RON: In my chapter 2, Tom says that one of your first major breakthroughs was the creation of a relational database system running on UNIX, a very new platform for a very new market. Tom wrote that one of your goals was to "create products for UNIX systems, rather than for proprietary systems," because you foresaw "an ‘open systems’ market for UNIX applications." Can you talk more about your goals with respect to your new company?

ROGER: At that time, the UNIX market didn’t really exist at all! When we started the company, there were only a few dozen UNIX machines in the commercial environment. This situation quickly changed. However, the marketing perceptual problem that "UNIX is for engineers and scientists, not businesses" persisted until the late 1980s. Until then, DECs VMS operating system provided the platform for companies like Oracle and Ingres to get a fast start in corporate markets. We had to pioneer the OEM software business and the VAR markets, and were fortunate that these markets were available for us.

RON: How did you finance the company?

ROGER: To start the company, my ex-girlfriend invested $20,000 in exchange for 10% of the stock. We inevitably got back together, in spite of the stress of the business, and have now been married for 18 years. As the company grew, we reinvested the profits.