Oracle

Oracle Corporation was founded in 1977 by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates initially named Software Development Laboratories. They started developing services but moved to selling packaged software which proved to be more lucrative.

Similar to Xerox PARC not capitalizing on their research, IBM had the same problem. The System R Research Team at IBM, with Edgar F. Codd, published papers on “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks.” which described a new type of storage using relational databases and the SQL spec.

Ellison and company implemented and productized this database while IBM focused on mainframes and their existing hierarchal storage systems. They called it the Oracle database, and a few years later in 1982 changed the company name to reflect their flagship product.