Oracle history

In 1978, the fledgling firm unveiled Oracle RDBMS, the world's first relational database using SQL. One year later, Oracle began shipping RDBMS, beating IBM to the market by nearly two years.

1982: Relational Software, Inc (RSI) becomes Oracle Systems Corporation.

Expansion, Competition, Going Public: 1982-86

In 1983 they came up with portable RDMBS that enabled Oracle to double its revenue to $5 million.

In 1983, Oracle developed the first portable RDBMS, which allowed firms to run their DBMS on various machines including mainframes, workstations, and personal computers.

The Oracle Database software was ported to the PC platform in November 1984 with the MS-DOS version (4.1.4) running in 512K of memory.

The company began expanding at a rapid pace with $23 million in sales by 1985.

In 1986 Oracle went public by selling one million shares.

Ellison and Miner took their company public in 1986.

By 1986 Oracle's customer base had grown to include 2,000 mainframe and minicomputer users represented by major international firms operating in such fields as the aerospace, automotive, pharmaceutical, and computer manufacturing industries, as well as a variety of government organizations.

To serve those customers, by 1986 Oracle had established 17 international marketing subsidiaries based in Australia, Canada, China, Europe, and the United Kingdom to market Oracle products in a total of 39 countries.

In 1987 Oracle became the largest database management company in the world.

By 1987, the number of software companies using Oracle products as a foundation for their applications had grown five-fold.

1987: Oracle Introduces UNIX-based Oracle applications

By 1987 Oracle had emerged as the relational DBMS choice of most major computer manufacturers, allowing the company to expand the scope of hardware brands on which Oracle's products could operate.

Late in August 1990 Oracle negotiated a $250 million revolving line of credit from a bank syndicate.

With Oracle's stock tumbling, the company's board approved an anti-takeover stockholder rights plan in December 1990, making any hostile attempt to acquire the firm more expensive and more difficult.

In 1990 Oracle experienced their first ever loss in the third quarter which led to hundreds of employees losing their jobs.

When the internal audit results were made public, prompting the firm to restate earnings for the first three quarters of 1990, Oracle's stock plummeted to $11.62 per share.

In 1990, when the firm experienced its first quarter of poor earnings, stock prices dropped from $25.38 to $17.50 in a single day.

Despite Oracle's most turbulent year in its history, 1990 was not without its firsts.

As Oracle's chief executive Ellison told Forbes magazine in 1991: "You pay a price for growing too rapidly."

By the end of its 1992 fiscal year, Oracle's balance sheet had improved as sales inched modestly upward and earnings rebounded, with the company logging $1.18 billion in sales while netting $61.5 million.

By mid-1994, Oracle's sales had reached $2 billion, its consulting services were accounting for a healthy 20 percent of sales, and it continued its strategy of internationalizing its franchise and fueling corporate America's switch from the mainframe to the client/server computing model.

Oracle and Hewlett Packard began working on an interactive TV system for Pacific Telesis in 1995.

To serve the data warehouse market better, in 1995 Oracle acquired a product line of Information Resources, Inc. (IRI), whose online analytical processing (or OLAP) software enabled users to perform sophisticated analyses of business data in data warehouses.

As Oracle readied Oracle8 for release, it introduced its WebSystem software in late 1995 to take advantage of the growing popularity of the Internet and its small-scale in-house cousins, the corporate intranet.

In 1995, Oracle Systems Corporation changed its name to Oracle Corporation, officially named Oracle, but is sometimes referred to as Oracle Corporation, the name of the holding company.

Since NC computers were not scheduled to reach users until late summer 1997 at the earliest, to some Ellison's multimillion-dollar NC marketing campaign seemed premature at best.

Because the Asian and Pacific Rim countries accounted for 15 percent of Oracle's sales and were its fastest-growing market, when their economies began to collapse in late 1997 Oracle felt the brunt.

At the close of its 1998 fiscal year in May, Oracle could take solace in quarterly sales of $2.4 billion--a 26 percent increase over the previous year.

In 1998, Oracle began to restructure itself around its Internet operations.

2008: Oracle Releases Oracle Beehive that provides team workspaces, email, calendar, instant messaging, and conferencing on a single platform.

ORACLE TEAM USA beats challenger Team New Zealand to win the 2013 America’s Cup yacht race, its second consecutive victory.

For the record, Oracle now has more than 138,000 employees, and in 2017 its annual revenues was in excess of $37 billion.