Mike Stonebraker

And so this was a database, a free database system that ran on Unix.

And so it was quite popular in the academic world.

And so we started getting lots of visitors at Berkeley who would say, gee, this is really nifty-looking stuff.

What's the biggest Ingress application you have?

And we'd be forced to say not very big.

And so this was brought home in spades when Arizona State University

considered running Ingress on their student records data, all 40,000 students worth.

And they could get over that they had to get an unsupported operating system from Bell Labs.

They could also get over, they had to run an unsupported database system from these guys at Berkeley.

But the project went down in flames when they realized there was no COBOL available for Unix.

and they were a COBOL shop.

So unsupported operating system, unsupported database system, no COBOL, doomed us to, you know, irrelevance.

And it was clear the only way out of that was to start a company.

And so in 1980, we got venture capital as it existed then and started Ingress Corporation.

to move Ingress to Dex VMS, a real operating system.

And we had a real company that would support Ingress.

And that was the start of the commercial journey.

Larry Ellison is a fabulous salesman.

And he, at the time, he made present tense and future tense indistinguishable.

And so he basically lied to customers.