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Larry Ellison - Founder of
Oracle
Lawrence J. Ellison, now one of the richest people in America (nearly rivalling Bill Gates), was born in the Bronx, New York in 1944. After he contracted pneumonia at 19 months, his young mother gave him to her great aunt and uncle to raise. He lived in a lower middle-class Jewish ghetto on the South Side of Chicago in a two-bedroom apartment. As a child Ellison showed an aptitude for math and science, which, he says, he liked because he was good at. Later he would be named science student of the year at the University of Illinois. However, he dropped out after two years when his adoptive mother died. Ellison then moved on to the University of Chicago where, even though he dropped out after one semester, he learned the basics of computer programming. From Illinois he headed out west to Berkeley, where he bounced around from job to job for the next eight years, finally landing a job with Ampex. Here he was a computer programmer and built a large database for the CIA; its codename was Oracle.
In 1977 Ellison and Robert Miner, Ellison’s former
supervisor from Ampex, collaborated to found Software
Development Labs. Eventually Ellison read a paper written by
an IBM employee about Structured Query Language (SQL).
Although IBM had not found any potential in the idea, Ellison
did and used it to create a database program compatible with
both mainframe and desktop computer systems. Miner and Ellison
then renamed their company Oracle and found their first
customers for the program: Wright Patterson Air Force Base and
the CIA. In 1981 IBM purchased Oracle’s SQL for its
mainframe systems, and, for the next seven years, Oracle’s
sales doubled each year. |
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