Ampex was developing a giant database for the CIA, and Ellison was assigned to the project, along with Bob Miner and Ed Oates. The CIA's codename for the project was Oracle. The project was something of a disaster, but it led eventually to the formation of Oracle Corporation and its current hugely successful range of databases. And in the same way that Apple based its Macintosh range of personal computers on original research done at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centre (Parc), Oracle's hugely successful "relational databases" were inspired by an idea developed by IBM.
Microsoft got started in 1975 and Oracle in 1977, but the two companies grew at around the same rate, and went public in the same year. They could have been friends and partners, since they were on different sides of computing's great divide: Microsoft supplying the small personal or "client" side software and Oracle providing the giant corporate database or "server" side. Personal computers using Microsoft software calling up data from mainframes running Oracle databases: what could be more obvious than that?
http://www.theguardian.com/g2/story/0,3604,215072,00.htmlhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_storage_device#Global_capacity.2C_digitization.2C_and_trends
