Oracle, a major market-cap technology company, was originally called which company when founded in 1977?

Oracle, a major market-cap technology company, was originally called Software Development Laboratories when founded in 1977.

Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, and Ed Oates founded Software Development Laboratories in 1977. The company pursued commercial database software influenced by relational-database research, including ideas associated with Edgar F. Codd’s work at IBM.

It changed its name to Relational Software, Inc. in 1979 and adopted the name Oracle Systems Corporation in 1982. The Oracle database became the company’s defining product and eventually supported its expansion into enterprise software, cloud services, and hardware.

Relational Software is therefore an important intermediate name, but it was not the original corporate name. Oracle’s current corporate identity developed through those successive name changes.