page_title: Informatics General
section_title: Origins of Mark IV and the software product business
hierarchical_section_title: Informatics General / Origins of Mark IV and the software product business
caption_attribution_description: IBM 360/85 console of the NSA.
context_page_description: 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 historian Martin Campbell-Kelly, in his 2003 volume From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry, considers 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. Historian Jeff Yost identifies Informatics as a pioneering "system integration" company, similar to System Development Corporation.
context_section_description: The history of what became Mark IV goes back to 1960 when GIRLS (the Generalized Information Retrieval and Listing System) was developed for the IBM 704 by John A. Postley (1923–2004), an engineer who had worked for many years in the aerospace industry; the first customer for GIRLS was the Douglas Aircraft Company.  Postley was working in the Advanced Information Systems subsidiary of Electrada Corporation along with Robert M. Hayes and others.
  In April 1963, Advanced Information Systems was purchased from Electrada by Hughes Dynamics, 
  an early 1960s subsidiary of the Hughes Tool Company
  that provided computerized management and information services.  
  Subsequent versions of GIRLS were called Mark I and Mark II; made for the IBM 1401, they were increasingly stronger in their capabilities.  Under Hughes, Mark III was in development, with key performance improvements.
  Hughes Dynamics then decided it wanted to exit the activity of making software.  
  While accounts later told by some Informatics executives imply that Howard Hughes himself was aware of, or played a role, in what was going on, Hughes biographers suggest that
  in the secretive world of his empire, it appears that Hughes was never informed of the existence of Hughes Dynamics until a couple of years after its creation; once he found out about it, he had it shut down.
  In any case, in May 1964, Informatics acquired Advanced Information Systems from Hughes Dynamics.  For this it paid essentially nothing: Hughes actually paid Informatics $38,000 to take it, but in doing so Informatics assume some existing customer obligations of about the same amount.
  Within Informatics, Postley became the champion of making another version, Mark IV, that was for the new IBM 360 computer line.  
  Mark IV was not the first file management system/report generator; indeed there had been several efforts in the late 1950s towards this end, including one from SHARE called 9PAC.  Indeed, it is possible Bauer and Wagner, who were both active in SHARE (Wagner had been a chair of it), were influenced as to the value of such a product by their exposure to previous efforts in that users group. 
  But only Postley had the full vision of what a software product might be; Informatics as a whole was reluctant to finance the development cost, which Postley estimated to be half a million dollars.  So Postley recruited five companies, each of whom provided $100,000: Sun Oil, National Dairy Industries, Allen-Bradley, Getty Oil, and Prudential.  
  Existence of the new product was first announced in 1967.
  Mark IV found quick success as a product:  during 1968, its initial year of availability, it garnered orders for 117 installations and sales of nearly $2 million.
  But IBM then decided to unbundle software from its mainframes in 1969, which helped facilitate the growth of the commercial software industry in the 1970s and beyond.
  This accelerated sales of Mark IV severalfold from what Informatics had anticipated.
caption: The IBM System/360 mainframe was the platform that Mark IV and many other Informatics software products ran on.
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