Informatics, Inc.
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| Public | |
| Traded as | : IG |
| Industry | |
| Fate | Acquired |
| Founded | Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California (March 19, 1962) |
| Founders |
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| Defunct | August 13, 1985 |
| Headquarters | Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, United States |
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Number of locations
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30 in North America 9 overseas |
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Key people
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| Products | File management and report generation; many others |
| Brands | "Fulfilling the computer's promise" |
| Revenue | $191 million (1984, equivalent to $450 million today) |
| Profit | $5 million (1984) |
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Number of employees
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2,600 (1985) |
| Divisions |
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Informatics General Corporation, earlier Informatics, Inc., was an American computer software company in existence from 1962 through 1985 and based in Los Angeles, California. It made a variety of software products, and was especially known for its Mark IV file management and report generation product for IBM mainframes, which became the best-selling corporate packaged software product of its time. It also ran computer service bureaus and sold turnkey systems to specific industries. By the mid-1980s Informatics had revenues of near $200 million and over 2,500 employees.
Computer science historian Martin Campbell-Kelly, in his 2003 volume From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry, has considered Informatics to be an exemplar of the independent, middle-sized software development firms of its era, and the Computer History Museum as well as the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota have conducted a number of oral histories of the company's key figures. The Chicago Tribune wrote that Informatics was "long a legend in software circles".
Informatics General was acquired by Sterling Software in 1985 in what was the first hostile takeover in the software industry.
Walter F. Bauer (1924–2015), the main founder of Informatics, was from Michigan and earned a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the University of Michigan. He became an executive at the Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation. There he was in charge of a unit with 400 employees and two computers, an IBM 704 and a UNIVAC 1103A, which led to him transferring to the company's information systems department, which in turn led to him having the responsibility to get government contracts. Bauer never worked as a computer programmer, but gained a good grasp of computer systems and their capabilities.
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