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1. The company started as Software Development Laboratories in 1977, and switched to Relational Software Inc. in 1979.
2. Larry Ellison has been the only CEO that Oracle has ever had.
3. One of Software Development Laboratories' first customers was the CIA. The company was hired to create a relational database management system (RDBMS) for the spy organization.
4. The CIA project's code name was Oracle.
5. The early ideas behind Oracle founders Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates' RDBMS development were largely inspired by a paper written by an IBM researcher.
6. IBM executives of the time didn't see any potential behind a so-called a Structured Query Language (SQL).
7. The first commercial version of Oracle was called Oracle 2 to give tech insiders the impression that the bugs were already worked out of the product.
8. After porting the Oracle RDBMS for commercial applications, the company grew by leaps and bounds. Revenue doubled every year between 1980 and 1987. A large part of that early success was owed to Oracle snagging IBM as a major customer.
9. In 1986, Oracle raised $31.5 million in its initial public offering.
10. Four years later, the company nearly faced bankruptcy, when it was found that executives and salespeople overstated revenue. Oracle's market capitalization plummeted by 80 percent.
11. The culprit? A penchant by executives and salespeople for overstating revenues.
12. The company managed to turn itself around with a purge of most of its executives and with the timely introduction of the landmark Oracle 7 in 1992.
13. CEO Larry 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.”
14. A lot of these efforts have been through acquisitions; Oracle has purchased 57 different companies in the last five years.
15. The buying frenzy was launched with the $10.3 billion acquisition of PeopleSoft in 2005, which put Oracle squarely in the ERP software fray.
16. The latest mega-purchase is Oracle's buy of Sun Microsystems, a $7.4 billion acquisition.
17. Oracle's interest in hardware squelched its relationship with HP, which previously bundled Oracle software with its hardware.
18. Oracle also this year bought Phase Forward, a life sciences application development company, for $685 million.
19. Last year, Oracle's revenue topped out at $26.82 billion.
20. Oracle today now has 345,000 customers worldwide.
21. Oracle boasts over 21,000 partners worldwide.
22. This summer, the U.S. Justice Department accused Oracle Corp. of defrauding the federal government on a software contract for more than $1 billion in sales.
23. Oracle recently sued Google for its use of Java within the Android mobile phone platform.
24. In a surprise to very few within the Open Source community, Oracle confirmed that it will be making future development of the Solaris platform closed source.
25. Following his controversial departure from HP, Mark Hurd was snapped up as a key executive for Oracle. HP is now suing Hurd and Oracle for the splashy move.
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