Cullinet
Encyclopedia
Cullinet was a software company whose products included the database management system
IDMS
and the integrated software
package Goldengate. In 1989, the company was bought by Computer Associates. Cullinet was headquartered at 400 Blue Hill Drive in Westwood, Massachusetts
.
users, which was at that time a new concept in an era when enterprises only used internally developed applications or the software that came bundled with the hardware.
Rather than write its own products, Cullinane approached IT departments of major enterprises, particularly banks, to identify internally developed applications that he felt had potential to be productized and licensed to others. However, it proved difficult to sell these applications because most weren't generalized and supportable systems. As a result, the company had to create its own utility packages. The first was a tape based source code management system, TMS, that competed with Pansophic's (PanDA) and UCC's products (UCC-1) in the space. TMS had the handicap of being "tape" and not "disk" based so it was never successful. The first breakthrough product was a report writer named Culprit, actually developed in-house by Gil Curtice and Anna Marie Thron, who had built the PHI payroll system. The product competed with Mark IV from Informatics but was perceived as a late entry in the report writer category.
The company struggled with financial stability until it branded a variation of Culprit, EDP Auditor,which was nothing more than a second name for the same product with a collection of predefined reports, but more importantly, special services aimed at the new discipline of EDP Auditing including the first EDP Auditors User, special support to give auditors independence of data processing which was very important to them. What was remarkable is that many corporations licensed essentially identical products. This led to serendipitous prosperity for Cullinane. As EDP auditors developed knowledge about business systems and computers, they could invariably produce reports faster than slower-moving internal IT departments. As a result, MIS departments would feel compelled to buy the Culprit version for their own use — to compete.
As the company prospered in the early '70s it was approached by a consultant to BFGoodrich
, Naomi O. Seligman
, to consider taking over development of a Honeywell database management system called IDS
that had been modified to operate on IBM and IBM compatible (RCA) mainframes . Actually IDS was originally developed by General Electric
, and a Bill Curtis had supposedly gotten the rights to convert the system to run on IBM equipment. The decision was made in early 1973 — primarily by John Cullinane, Jim Baker and Tom Muerer — to bet the company on the effort. Several executives joined the effort over the next three years, including Andrew Filipowski
, Robert Goldman, Jon Nackerud, Ron McKinney, William Casey, Bob Davis, Bill Linn, and Ray Nawara. IDMS was to be a great bet for the company as it became the leader among many capable and popular products of the mainframe era. It competed with Cincom
's Total, Software AG
's ADABAS
, Applied Data Research
's DATACOM/DB
, Computer Corporation of America's Model 204, MRI (later Intel's) System 2000 and IBM's IMS & DL/1. In 1976 the source code was sold to International Computers Limited (ICL), whose developers ported the software to run on their 2900 series mainframes, and subsequently also on the older 1900 range. ICL continued development of the software independently of Cullinane, selling the originally ported product under the name IDMS and an enhanced version as IDMSX. In this form it was used by many large UK and international users, examples being the Pay-As-You-Earn system operated by Inland Revenue and a system for Barclays Bank in South Africa. Many of these systems are still running in 2010 on Fujitsu equipment.
John Cullinane mentored a series of future entrepreneurs and software industry executives. One of the early executives was Andrew 'Flip' Filipowski
, who later founded Platinum Technology
, Inc.. Another was Robert Goldman who became the CEO of several public software companies including AICorp. Jon Nackerud was a co-founder of Relational Technology, Inc., formed to commercialize the Ingres database management system. Prior to becoming a public company in 1978 the company's name was changed to Cullinane Database Systems, Inc. The company changed its name again to Cullinet Software in 1983, partly because John Cullinane wanted to distance his name from the personal connection to the business when he turned the company over to Bob Goldman, and also in a nod to the importance of computer networking. Joe McNay, a board member, was particularly important regarding the company's IPO, the first ever in the software products industry. Of note is that Greylock
purchased some shares from John Cullinane in 1977 less than a year before the company was to go public. It was to be the early foundation on which their Greylock's software technology investment prowess rested. It was Greylock’s first investment in a software company.
Cullinane's public offering was of note as it was the first successful offering of a pure software products company ever and the first software company Hambrecht & Quist
ever took public. Cullinet was also the first software company to have a billion dollar valuation, and the first to do a Super Bowl
ad. Specifically, Cullinane Database Systems, Inc., went public in 1978. On April 27, 1982 the company became the first computer software firm to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange
and later, the first to become a component stock of the S&P 500
Index. However, two quarters after the company went public IBM introduced its 4300 series. Its salesmen told all mutual clients that IDMS didn't run on the 4300 series and that all IBM software of the future would be built with IMS/DL1. This caused a major problem as every IDMS customer went ballistic and every prospect went on hold. The company only had three months to solve this marketing problem, and technical problem, and remarkably, they did. Technically, it only required the modification of one instruction to get IDMS running on a 4300. The solution to the company's revenue problem turned out to be its new Integrated Data Dictionary. By moving very fast, the company used it to put IBM on the defensive and made its numbers, no small accomplishment. It then went from winning one out five competitions to winning four out five and this fueled its growth.
Beginning in 1979, in an attempt to promote less dependence on the database sales alone, Cullinane fully integrated financial and manufacturing applications with IDMS and decision support systems, another first. The company acquired financial applications from McCormack & Dodge, a financial software company (which was bought by Dun & Bradstreet
later in 1983) and completely rewrote them using IDMS. They also acquired an MRP system from Rath & Strong and completely rewrote it using IDMS. Thus, Cullinet had a suite of integrated financial and manufacturing systems, the first on-line database driven applications, and was a major competitor in what is now called ERP
. The company had become a software power house. Eventually, it acquired a small Boston-based company called Computer Pictures whose graphics-focused decision support system had already been integrated with IDMS and was very successful. This team developed Goldengate, a Lotus Symphony-like PC product.
Goldengate was a part of Cullinet's flawed ICMS (Information Center Management System). The promise of ICMS was the ability to move data between the mainframe and PC desktop. Apple Computer was supposed to do the same for the Apple Lisa
, but never delivered. ICMS was unveiled in 1983 as part of a splashy 20+ city closed circuit TV broadcast that focused on IDMS/R and fueled the market for Cullinet for the next two years, but it was obvious that it was getting harder to maintain its unbroken string of quarters with sales and earnings in excess of 50%.
Goldengate was a mistake. The company should have developed PC based IDMS development tools, instead. Ironically, it had the technology under development which was later to become the foundation of PowerBuilder
at Powersoft. In fairness many failures mark the landscape in that space and era including the infamous Ovation product introduced with great fanfare by Ovation Corporation in a race with Lotus's Symphony suite attempting to create the early office suites now dominated by Microsoft Corp.
Goldengate's other flaw was that it was built pre-Windows which was expensive for Cullinet because of all the permutations and combinations of PC hardware and memory configurations.
In 1983 John Cullinane, after 25 years in the software business, handed over the helm of Cullinet to Bob Goldman while he began to pursue other interests. Things continued to go well but eventually the company ran into trouble and Cullinane brought in a recent acquaintance, David Chapman, as CEO of the company. At the time, Cullinet had some $50,000,000 in cash reserves. David Chapman, a veteran IBM and Data General executive, started an aggressive campaign to acquire technology from other companies. The reason for bringing in Chapman was that the company had got hung up on the open architecture and relational issues. In other words, a company with an unparalleled record of outpositioning competition every two years, for sixteen years, including IBM, allowed itself to get outpositioned by IBM, and others, with the help of E. F. Codd and C.J. Date. This was the company's fault, not theirs.
In 1986-87, David Chapman attempted to move the company to the more and more powerful minicomputers such as Digital Equipment Corporation's VAX
line of computers. In the process, Cullinet acquired some very questionable VAX companies but one had an outstanding relational DBMS but by then it was too late, the company's $50 million nest egg had been burned.
In 1988, John Cullinane returned to Cullinet, fired Chapman, and tried to salvage the company. By repositioning the company's product line with a new product called Enterprise Generator, he solved the open architecture problem and the company was able to return to profitability by the fourth quarter, which made it possible to negotiate a deal with Charles Wang
, head of Computer Associates.
In 1989, Wang bought the company for $330,000,000 in stock. It was a good deal for investors, which was reflected in the fact that the shares of CA increased in value ten times. It was a good deal for John Cullinane, too.
Nowadays Computer Associates actively markets and supports the CA IDMS relational database system for IBM z/OS, z/VSE and z/VM, Fujitsu Siemens BS2000/OSD, Linux (CA IDMS Server), UNIX (CA IDMS Server) and Windows (CA IDMS Server).
: A CODASYL
network
database management system
first developed at B.F. Goodrich
. John Cullinane acquired the rights to market IDMS in the early 1970s. IDMS legacy systems are still being run today. Only a few customers have migrated to IDMS/R.
IDMS/R: There were two products of this name. The first was an evolution of IDMS in approximately 1984. The second was a completely separate database engine developed in California by Dr. Kapali Eswaran who was originally from IBM
's System R project. The company had also developed a 4GL
for use with the database engine. The components were all named after planets. This product was designed to run on the Digital
VAX
system. Eswaron's company Esvel was acquired by Cullinet in July 1987 and its main product re-launched as IDMS/R. The 4GL was dropped in favour of one developed by a Cancor, a Canadian company based in Mississauga, Ontario
which was acquired in January 1987.
IDMS-DC : A teleprocessing system similar to IBM's CICS
system. When it was first released, it was reported that IBM challenged Cullinane to prove that the code had not violated copyright. This suspicion was due to the fact that many internal CICS codes begin with the initials "RH". Many IDMS-DC modules also begin with "RH" after it two authors, Nick Rini and Don Heitzman, both employees of Cullinane.
ADS/Online : IDMS-DC help spawn a fourth generation (4GL) programming system called ADS/Online (Application Development System). The original name of the product was "AIDS". ADS/Online was a COBOL
-like language and was successful because it competed against CICS, which tended to be used mainly by COBOL programmers. ADS/O was later ported to run directly in CICS and was adopted by nearly 1,500 companies.
ADS/Batch : A port of ADS/Online to the batch mainframe environment. It was not well received by Cullinet's customers.
Culprit : An RPG-like reporting tool. It was also marketed as tool for use by auditors under the name EDP Auditor.
Online Query (OLQ) : A powerful online reporting tool.
Online English : A powerful online reporting tool that used the "Intellect" natural language AI engine from Artificial Intelligence Corporation (AICorp).
IDD : (Integrated Data Dictionary) A renowned integrated data dictionary.
TMS : An early tape based source code management system that was long forgotten.
Database management system
A database management system is a software package with computer programs that control the creation, maintenance, and use of a database. It allows organizations to conveniently develop databases for various applications by database administrators and other specialists. A database is an integrated...
IDMS
IDMS
IDMS is primarily a network database management system for mainframes. It was first developed at B.F. Goodrich and later marketed by Cullinane Database Systems...
and the integrated software
Integrated software
Integrated software is software for personal computers that combines the most commonly used functions of many productivity software programs into one application....
package Goldengate. In 1989, the company was bought by Computer Associates. Cullinet was headquartered at 400 Blue Hill Drive in Westwood, Massachusetts
Westwood, Massachusetts
Westwood is a town in Norfolk County, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 14,618 at the 2010 census. In July 2005, CNN/Money and Money magazine ranked Westwood 13th on its list of the 100 Best Places to Live in the United States. Boston Magazine listed Gay Street in Westwood on its...
.
History
The company was originally started by John Cullinane and Larry English in 1968 as Cullinane Corporation. Their idea was to sell pre-packaged software to mainframeMainframe computer
Mainframes are powerful computers used primarily by corporate and governmental organizations for critical applications, bulk data processing such as census, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and financial transaction processing.The term originally referred to the...
users, which was at that time a new concept in an era when enterprises only used internally developed applications or the software that came bundled with the hardware.
Rather than write its own products, Cullinane approached IT departments of major enterprises, particularly banks, to identify internally developed applications that he felt had potential to be productized and licensed to others. However, it proved difficult to sell these applications because most weren't generalized and supportable systems. As a result, the company had to create its own utility packages. The first was a tape based source code management system, TMS, that competed with Pansophic's (PanDA) and UCC's products (UCC-1) in the space. TMS had the handicap of being "tape" and not "disk" based so it was never successful. The first breakthrough product was a report writer named Culprit, actually developed in-house by Gil Curtice and Anna Marie Thron, who had built the PHI payroll system. The product competed with Mark IV from Informatics but was perceived as a late entry in the report writer category.
The company struggled with financial stability until it branded a variation of Culprit, EDP Auditor,which was nothing more than a second name for the same product with a collection of predefined reports, but more importantly, special services aimed at the new discipline of EDP Auditing including the first EDP Auditors User, special support to give auditors independence of data processing which was very important to them. What was remarkable is that many corporations licensed essentially identical products. This led to serendipitous prosperity for Cullinane. As EDP auditors developed knowledge about business systems and computers, they could invariably produce reports faster than slower-moving internal IT departments. As a result, MIS departments would feel compelled to buy the Culprit version for their own use — to compete.
As the company prospered in the early '70s it was approached by a consultant to BFGoodrich
BFGoodrich
BFGoodrich is an American brand of tires. Separated from the Goodrich company and now owned by Michelin.Some Michelin competition tyres are now branded BFGoodrich to increase brand awareness....
, Naomi O. Seligman
Naomi O. Seligman
Naomi O. Seligman is a member of the Board of Directors of Oracle Corporation since November 2005.She was also a member of the Board of Directors of Sun Microsystems from June 1999 until her resignation in August 2007. - External links :*...
, to consider taking over development of a Honeywell database management system called IDS
Integrated Data Store
Integrated Data Store is a network database largely used by industry for its performance.IDS was designed by Charles Bachman at General Electric in the 1960s. It was not known to be easy to use or implement applications with, because it was designed to maximize performance using the hardware...
that had been modified to operate on IBM and IBM compatible (RCA) mainframes . Actually IDS was originally developed by General Electric
General Electric
General Electric Company , or GE, is an American multinational conglomerate corporation incorporated in Schenectady, New York and headquartered in Fairfield, Connecticut, United States...
, and a Bill Curtis had supposedly gotten the rights to convert the system to run on IBM equipment. The decision was made in early 1973 — primarily by John Cullinane, Jim Baker and Tom Muerer — to bet the company on the effort. Several executives joined the effort over the next three years, including Andrew Filipowski
Andrew Filipowski
Andrew J. "Flip" Filipowski is a Polish American technology entrepreneur born in 1950 in Chicago, IL. He is currently the Executive Chairman and CEO of SilkRoad Equity, a private investment firm, and founded Platinum Technology in 1985...
, Robert Goldman, Jon Nackerud, Ron McKinney, William Casey, Bob Davis, Bill Linn, and Ray Nawara. IDMS was to be a great bet for the company as it became the leader among many capable and popular products of the mainframe era. It competed with Cincom
Cincom
Cincom Systems is a privately held, multinational, computer technology corporation founded in 1968 by Tom Nies, Tom Richley and Claude Bogardus....
's Total, Software AG
Software AG
Founded in 1969, Software AG is an enterprise software company with over 10,000 enterprise customers in over 70 countries. The company is the second largest software vendor in Germany, the fourth in Europe and among the top 25 globally...
's ADABAS
Adabas
ADABAS is Software AG’s primary database management system.- History :First released in 1970, ADABAS is considered by some to have been one of the earliest commercially available database products...
, Applied Data Research
Applied Data Research
Applied Data Research was a large software vendor from the 1960s until the mid-1980s. ADR is often described as "the first independent software vendor"....
's DATACOM/DB
DATACOM/DB
Datacom/DB is a relational database management system for the mainframes. Originally developed by Insyte Datacom, later acquired by Applied Data Research, it is now owned by CA Technologies which renamed it to CA-Datacom/DB and later to CA Datacom/DB.- External links :****...
, Computer Corporation of America's Model 204, MRI (later Intel's) System 2000 and IBM's IMS & DL/1. In 1976 the source code was sold to International Computers Limited (ICL), whose developers ported the software to run on their 2900 series mainframes, and subsequently also on the older 1900 range. ICL continued development of the software independently of Cullinane, selling the originally ported product under the name IDMS and an enhanced version as IDMSX. In this form it was used by many large UK and international users, examples being the Pay-As-You-Earn system operated by Inland Revenue and a system for Barclays Bank in South Africa. Many of these systems are still running in 2010 on Fujitsu equipment.
John Cullinane mentored a series of future entrepreneurs and software industry executives. One of the early executives was Andrew 'Flip' Filipowski
Andrew Filipowski
Andrew J. "Flip" Filipowski is a Polish American technology entrepreneur born in 1950 in Chicago, IL. He is currently the Executive Chairman and CEO of SilkRoad Equity, a private investment firm, and founded Platinum Technology in 1985...
, who later founded Platinum Technology
Platinum Technology
Platinum Technology Inc. was founded by Andrew Filipowski in 1987 to market and support deployment of database management software products and the applications enabled by database management technology and render related services...
, Inc.. Another was Robert Goldman who became the CEO of several public software companies including AICorp. Jon Nackerud was a co-founder of Relational Technology, Inc., formed to commercialize the Ingres database management system. Prior to becoming a public company in 1978 the company's name was changed to Cullinane Database Systems, Inc. The company changed its name again to Cullinet Software in 1983, partly because John Cullinane wanted to distance his name from the personal connection to the business when he turned the company over to Bob Goldman, and also in a nod to the importance of computer networking. Joe McNay, a board member, was particularly important regarding the company's IPO, the first ever in the software products industry. Of note is that Greylock
Greylock
Greylock Partners is one of the oldest venture capital firms, founded in 1965, with committed capital of over $2 billion under management. The firm focuses on early stage companies in the consumer, enterprise software and infrastructure as well as semiconductor sectors.Today, Greylock operates out...
purchased some shares from John Cullinane in 1977 less than a year before the company was to go public. It was to be the early foundation on which their Greylock's software technology investment prowess rested. It was Greylock’s first investment in a software company.
Cullinane's public offering was of note as it was the first successful offering of a pure software products company ever and the first software company Hambrecht & Quist
Hambrecht & Quist
Hambrecht & Quist was an investment bank based in San Francisco, California noted for its focus on the technology and internet sectors. H&Q was founded by William Hambrecht and George Quist in California, 1968....
ever took public. Cullinet was also the first software company to have a billion dollar valuation, and the first to do a Super Bowl
Super Bowl
The Super Bowl is the championship game of the National Football League , the highest level of professional American football in the United States, culminating a season that begins in the late summer of the previous calendar year. The Super Bowl uses Roman numerals to identify each game, rather...
ad. Specifically, Cullinane Database Systems, Inc., went public in 1978. On April 27, 1982 the company became the first computer software firm to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange
New York Stock Exchange
The New York Stock Exchange is a stock exchange located at 11 Wall Street in Lower Manhattan, New York City, USA. It is by far the world's largest stock exchange by market capitalization of its listed companies at 13.39 trillion as of Dec 2010...
and later, the first to become a component stock of the S&P 500
S&P 500
The S&P 500 is a free-float capitalization-weighted index published since 1957 of the prices of 500 large-cap common stocks actively traded in the United States. The stocks included in the S&P 500 are those of large publicly held companies that trade on either of the two largest American stock...
Index. However, two quarters after the company went public IBM introduced its 4300 series. Its salesmen told all mutual clients that IDMS didn't run on the 4300 series and that all IBM software of the future would be built with IMS/DL1. This caused a major problem as every IDMS customer went ballistic and every prospect went on hold. The company only had three months to solve this marketing problem, and technical problem, and remarkably, they did. Technically, it only required the modification of one instruction to get IDMS running on a 4300. The solution to the company's revenue problem turned out to be its new Integrated Data Dictionary. By moving very fast, the company used it to put IBM on the defensive and made its numbers, no small accomplishment. It then went from winning one out five competitions to winning four out five and this fueled its growth.
Beginning in 1979, in an attempt to promote less dependence on the database sales alone, Cullinane fully integrated financial and manufacturing applications with IDMS and decision support systems, another first. The company acquired financial applications from McCormack & Dodge, a financial software company (which was bought by Dun & Bradstreet
Dun & Bradstreet
Dun & Bradstreet is a Fortune 500 public company headquartered in Short Hills, New Jersey, USA that provides information on businesses and corporations for use in credit decisions, B2B marketing and supply chain management...
later in 1983) and completely rewrote them using IDMS. They also acquired an MRP system from Rath & Strong and completely rewrote it using IDMS. Thus, Cullinet had a suite of integrated financial and manufacturing systems, the first on-line database driven applications, and was a major competitor in what is now called ERP
Enterprise resource planning
Enterprise resource planning systems integrate internal and external management information across an entire organization, embracing finance/accounting, manufacturing, sales and service, customer relationship management, etc. ERP systems automate this activity with an integrated software application...
. The company had become a software power house. Eventually, it acquired a small Boston-based company called Computer Pictures whose graphics-focused decision support system had already been integrated with IDMS and was very successful. This team developed Goldengate, a Lotus Symphony-like PC product.
Goldengate was a part of Cullinet's flawed ICMS (Information Center Management System). The promise of ICMS was the ability to move data between the mainframe and PC desktop. Apple Computer was supposed to do the same for the Apple Lisa
Apple Lisa
The Apple Lisa—also known as the Lisa—is a :personal computer designed by Apple Computer, Inc. during the early 1980s....
, but never delivered. ICMS was unveiled in 1983 as part of a splashy 20+ city closed circuit TV broadcast that focused on IDMS/R and fueled the market for Cullinet for the next two years, but it was obvious that it was getting harder to maintain its unbroken string of quarters with sales and earnings in excess of 50%.
Goldengate was a mistake. The company should have developed PC based IDMS development tools, instead. Ironically, it had the technology under development which was later to become the foundation of PowerBuilder
PowerBuilder
PowerBuilder is an integrated development environment owned by Sybase, a division of SAP. It has been in use since 1991, peaking around 1998 with around 100,000 users....
at Powersoft. In fairness many failures mark the landscape in that space and era including the infamous Ovation product introduced with great fanfare by Ovation Corporation in a race with Lotus's Symphony suite attempting to create the early office suites now dominated by Microsoft Corp.
Goldengate's other flaw was that it was built pre-Windows which was expensive for Cullinet because of all the permutations and combinations of PC hardware and memory configurations.
In 1983 John Cullinane, after 25 years in the software business, handed over the helm of Cullinet to Bob Goldman while he began to pursue other interests. Things continued to go well but eventually the company ran into trouble and Cullinane brought in a recent acquaintance, David Chapman, as CEO of the company. At the time, Cullinet had some $50,000,000 in cash reserves. David Chapman, a veteran IBM and Data General executive, started an aggressive campaign to acquire technology from other companies. The reason for bringing in Chapman was that the company had got hung up on the open architecture and relational issues. In other words, a company with an unparalleled record of outpositioning competition every two years, for sixteen years, including IBM, allowed itself to get outpositioned by IBM, and others, with the help of E. F. Codd and C.J. Date. This was the company's fault, not theirs.
In 1986-87, David Chapman attempted to move the company to the more and more powerful minicomputers such as Digital Equipment Corporation's VAX
VAX
VAX was an instruction set architecture developed by Digital Equipment Corporation in the mid-1970s. A 32-bit complex instruction set computer ISA, it was designed to extend or replace DEC's various Programmed Data Processor ISAs...
line of computers. In the process, Cullinet acquired some very questionable VAX companies but one had an outstanding relational DBMS but by then it was too late, the company's $50 million nest egg had been burned.
In 1988, John Cullinane returned to Cullinet, fired Chapman, and tried to salvage the company. By repositioning the company's product line with a new product called Enterprise Generator, he solved the open architecture problem and the company was able to return to profitability by the fourth quarter, which made it possible to negotiate a deal with Charles Wang
Charles Wang
Charles B. Wang is the co-founder of Computer Associates International, Inc. and owner of the New York Islanders ice hockey team and their AHL affiliates, the Bridgeport Sound Tigers....
, head of Computer Associates.
In 1989, Wang bought the company for $330,000,000 in stock. It was a good deal for investors, which was reflected in the fact that the shares of CA increased in value ten times. It was a good deal for John Cullinane, too.
Nowadays Computer Associates actively markets and supports the CA IDMS relational database system for IBM z/OS, z/VSE and z/VM, Fujitsu Siemens BS2000/OSD, Linux (CA IDMS Server), UNIX (CA IDMS Server) and Windows (CA IDMS Server).
Products
IDMSIDMS
IDMS is primarily a network database management system for mainframes. It was first developed at B.F. Goodrich and later marketed by Cullinane Database Systems...
: A CODASYL
CODASYL
CODASYL is an acronym for "Conference on Data Systems Languages". This was a consortium formed in 1959 to guide the development of a standard programming language that could be used on many computers...
network
Network model
The network model is a database model conceived as a flexible way of representing objects and their relationships. Its distinguishing feature is that the schema, viewed as a graph in which object types are nodes and relationship types are arcs, is not restricted to being a hierarchy or lattice.The...
database management system
Database management system
A database management system is a software package with computer programs that control the creation, maintenance, and use of a database. It allows organizations to conveniently develop databases for various applications by database administrators and other specialists. A database is an integrated...
first developed at B.F. Goodrich
Goodrich Corporation
The Goodrich Corporation , formerly the B.F. Goodrich Company, is an American aerospace manufacturing company based in Charlotte, North Carolina. Founded in Akron, Ohio in 1870 as Goodrich, Tew & Co. by Dr. Benjamin Franklin Goodrich. The company name was changed to the "B.F...
. John Cullinane acquired the rights to market IDMS in the early 1970s. IDMS legacy systems are still being run today. Only a few customers have migrated to IDMS/R.
IDMS/R: There were two products of this name. The first was an evolution of IDMS in approximately 1984. The second was a completely separate database engine developed in California by Dr. Kapali Eswaran who was originally from IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
's System R project. The company had also developed a 4GL
Fourth-generation programming language
A fourth-generation programming language is a programming language or programming environment designed with a specific purpose in mind, such as the development of commercial business software. In the history of computer science, the 4GL followed the 3GL in an upward trend toward higher...
for use with the database engine. The components were all named after planets. This product was designed to run on the Digital
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...
VAX
VAX
VAX was an instruction set architecture developed by Digital Equipment Corporation in the mid-1970s. A 32-bit complex instruction set computer ISA, it was designed to extend or replace DEC's various Programmed Data Processor ISAs...
system. Eswaron's company Esvel was acquired by Cullinet in July 1987 and its main product re-launched as IDMS/R. The 4GL was dropped in favour of one developed by a Cancor, a Canadian company based in Mississauga, Ontario
Ontario
Ontario is a province of Canada, located in east-central Canada. It is Canada's most populous province and second largest in total area. It is home to the nation's most populous city, Toronto, and the nation's capital, Ottawa....
which was acquired in January 1987.
IDMS-DC : A teleprocessing system similar to IBM's CICS
CICS
Customer Information Control System is a transaction server that runs primarily on IBM mainframe systems under z/OS and z/VSE.CICS is a transaction manager designed for rapid, high-volume online processing. This processing is mostly interactive , but background transactions are possible...
system. When it was first released, it was reported that IBM challenged Cullinane to prove that the code had not violated copyright. This suspicion was due to the fact that many internal CICS codes begin with the initials "RH". Many IDMS-DC modules also begin with "RH" after it two authors, Nick Rini and Don Heitzman, both employees of Cullinane.
ADS/Online : IDMS-DC help spawn a fourth generation (4GL) programming system called ADS/Online (Application Development System). The original name of the product was "AIDS". ADS/Online was a COBOL
COBOL
COBOL is one of the oldest programming languages. Its name is an acronym for COmmon Business-Oriented Language, defining its primary domain in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments....
-like language and was successful because it competed against CICS, which tended to be used mainly by COBOL programmers. ADS/O was later ported to run directly in CICS and was adopted by nearly 1,500 companies.
ADS/Batch : A port of ADS/Online to the batch mainframe environment. It was not well received by Cullinet's customers.
Culprit : An RPG-like reporting tool. It was also marketed as tool for use by auditors under the name EDP Auditor.
Online Query (OLQ) : A powerful online reporting tool.
Online English : A powerful online reporting tool that used the "Intellect" natural language AI engine from Artificial Intelligence Corporation (AICorp).
IDD : (Integrated Data Dictionary) A renowned integrated data dictionary.
TMS : An early tape based source code management system that was long forgotten.
External links
- Oral history interview with John Cullinane. Charles Babbage InstituteCharles Babbage InstituteThe Charles Babbage Institute is a research center at the University of Minnesota specializing in the history of information technology, particularly the history since 1935 of digital computing, programming/software, and computer networking....
, University of Minnesota. Discusses the firm's development and marketing of a number of new software products, including Culprit, Library Update System, EDP Auditor, and IDMSIDMSIDMS is primarily a network database management system for mainframes. It was first developed at B.F. Goodrich and later marketed by Cullinane Database Systems...
, and IDMSDC. - CA IDMS current main site