| Notes |
Oracle's office in Reston, Va., is near the headquarters of the C.I.A., which is appropriate enough: when Larry Ellison founded the company 25 years ago, his first client was the C.I.A., to whom he sold a program called Oracle, the world's first ''relational'' database. At that time, information in computer databases was stored in unrelated files: a company like Ford, for example, could keep one file of its employees and another file of its departments, but it had no easy way of relating the two files. Ellison saw the commercial potential of the relational database and began marketing it in 1979. By the height of the dot-com boom in 2000, Ellison's net worth had soared to $80 billion, making him (briefly) the richest person in the world. |