Informix

I mean, I never published a piece of fiction.

I had, um, in, in the intervening years, I did stumble across a, a, a, a technical company, um, called Informix that wanted, that was looking for writers.

They were, they were actively advertising for writers, that they would, you know, publish a book with your name on it and put it in bookstores.

And I was like, "Well, that sounds great.

...

they dominated the client server database, but what move did they make? Oh, by the way, and there was Informix back there and Sybase, et cetera.

They moved into the application layer because they knew that there was more defensibility in customer lock-in when you started automating the workflows and had hundreds and thousands of users.

So I think history of where the infrastructure didn't win, the applications do, they know it's gonna play out again with AI.

They were building the Inktomi search engine, which is essentially the predecessor of Google, and trying to build it on clusters, not on a single big box, which is the way previous search engines had been built.

And their first effort at this was to take a transactional database, I believe it was Informix at the time, which was at that time a very good parallel database, and see if they could build a search engine with it.

And all the transactionality guarantees that the database provided were getting in the way of availability.

So if a single node in the database went down, the database would say, "Uh-oh, it's not safe to run transactions," and it would lock you out, right? And they couldn't build a always-on search engine that way.

And that's why, for example, from a data perspective, you've got a huge Z business.

We of course have, have DB2s, we have Data Stage, we have everything else that you would know of, Informix and everything else, that is kind of centered around the fact that, that we basically run the business for large part of the data real estate.

So that's, that's one.

Right? That, that's one.

You're just kind of turning the crank.

I was using Informix and Ingress.

Informix, I was using Informix for GL.

Ingress, there was some GUI tooling that went around it.

But that's kind of what you got.

You know, I was lucky enough as a kid to have internet in the house at a very young age due to my dad's role.

He was like an Informix developer.

And so when he would go to work, you know, I would sneak on the computer and go and dial up different destinations and see what's there, kind of the things everybody was doing at the time.

And Also, the video games at the time that were out on different computers, a lot of them were just super easy to cheat on, open up a hex editor.