Cullinet
technology company
Cullinet was a software company whose products included the database management system IDMS and the integrated software package Goldengate. In 1989, the company was bought by Computer Associates. Cullinet was founded in Arlington, Massachusetts and later headquartered at 400 Blue Hill Drive in Westwood, Massachusetts.
History
Early years
The company was started by John Cullinane and Larry English in 1968 as Cullinane Corporation. Their idea was to sell pre-packaged software to mainframe users, which was at that time a new concept in an era when enterprises only used internally developed applications or the software that came bundled with the hardware.
Rather than write its own products, Cullinane approached IT (information technology) departments (at that time called Data Processing departments) of major enterprises, particularly banks, to identify internally developed applications that he felt had potential to be productized and licensed to others. However, it proved difficult to sell these applications because most weren't generalized and supportable systems. As a result, the company decided to develop a source code management system, called PLUS, that competed with Pansophic's (Panvalet) and UCC's products (UCC-1 tape management system, etc.). The first version of PLUS (which stood for Program Library Update System) required the use of magnetic tape devices, and was not competitive with the other, disk-based products. Although the company eventually responded with a disk-based version, called PLUS-DA (which stood for Direct Access, a common name for disks at the time) they did not become successful in this market.
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The date and method of observation matter as much as the stated conclusion, especially where classification or consensus has changed. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5193036. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1989 and 1968.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cullinet” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.