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1. It took two name changes in five years before Oracle became Oracle in 1982.
2. The company started as Software Development Laboratories in 1977, and switched to Relational Software Inc. in 1979.
3. Larry Ellison founded the company with Bob Miner and Ed Oates.
4. Ellison is the only CEO that Oracle has ever had.
5. A self-made billionaire, Ellison at one point eclipsed Bill Gates as the richest man in the world.
6. One of Software Development Laboratories' first customers was the CIA, for which the company created a relational database management system.
7. The CIA project's code name was Oracle.
8. The early ideas behind Oracle's RDBMS development were largely inspired by a paper written by an IBM researcher.
9. IBM executives didn't see any potential behind a so-called a Structured Query Language (SQL).
10. The first commercial version of Oracle was called Oracle 2 to give customers the impression that the bugs were already worked out of the product.
11. After the company ported the Oracle RDBMS for commercial applications, revenue doubled every year between 1980 and 1987.
12. Much of that early success was owed to picking up IBM as a major customer.
13. In 1986, Oracle raised $31.5 million in its initial public offering.
14. Four years later, the company nearly faced bankruptcy.
15. A penchant for overstating revenues was discovered, and Oracle's market capitalization plummeted by 80 percent.
16. The company purged most of its executives and introduced the landmark Oracle 7 in 1992.
17. Major changes in architecture and addition of application development tools, administration features and improved security restored Oracle's reputation.
18. In 1995 Oracle was one of the first enterprise software companies to announce an overarching Internet strategy.
19. The second half of the '90s was spent retooling Oracle products in line with that online strategy.
20. Ellison said in 1998: "If the internet turns out not to be the future of computing, we're toast. But if it is, we're golden."
21. Oracle was the first enterprise software company to fully embrace the Java programming language back in 1998.
22. Oracle expanded beyond the database with the 2000 launch of Oracle E-BusinessSuite 11i, an integrated suite of enterprise applications.
23. The decade following this launch has seen Oracle pursue a quest to dominate the enterprise application and middleware markets.
24. Oracle has purchased 57 different companies in the last five years.
25. The buying frenzy was launched with the $10.3 billion acquisition of PeopleSoft in 2005, which put Oracle squarely in the ERP software fray.
26. A year later picked up CRM giant Siebel Systems for $5.85 billion.
27. Oracle branched out into business intelligence in 2007 with the $3.3 billion buy of Hyperion.
28. The latest mega-purchase: Sun Microsystems, a $7.4 billion acquisition due to close this year if regulators don't object.
29. Speculations abounded last summer that Oracle wanted to sell Sun's hardware division before the acquisition even closed.
30. In September, Ellison claimed that pairing Sun hardware with Oracle software was the plan all along.
31. This interest in hardware squelched Oracle's relationship with HP, which previously bundled Oracle software with its hardware.
32. Oracle today now has 345,000 customers worldwide.
33. Oracle employs more than 73,201 people around the globe.
34. Oracle's headquarters complex was constructed on the former site of the Marine World Africa USA amusement park.
35. The small body of water that headquarters buildings butt against are dubbed 'Larry's Lagoon' by company insiders.
36. Ellison was raised by the aunt and uncle of his unwed teenage mother.
37. Ellison, known for his extravagant spending, styled his California abode as a feudal Japanese estate.
38. An avid sailor, in 1998 Ellison and his team won the Sydney to Hobart race in fatal near-hurricane wind.
39. Ellison co-owns the sixth largest yacht in the world with media mogul David Geffen.
40. In order to settle insider trader charges made against him, Ellison in 2005 agreed to $100 million in charitable donations.
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