DayFlo

From Wiki

DayFlo was a semi-structured text database based on hyper text research. It was a commercial product in the days when Oracle was still just vaporware. The best modern expression of it is Mediawiki.

The DayFlo front-end was based on a text editor I wrote called F. My version of F was written first in Pascal and then in C and derived from Dr. James Meehan's version of F for the PDP-10. Later Eric Olsen, Steve Whitehill, and others improved the C language version of F. The editor was basically open source ... but not actually! Technically it would have been owned by the Regents of the University of California. Unbeknown to me someone from the Gilchrist Research Corporation had obtained a copy and used it as the front-end to the DayFlo database.

One day I was approached to do some contracting for a 'Christian Database Company'. I thought that was a bit strange and interesting. I thought it was some kind of database of Christian things but actually what the person meant was the company was generally founded by Christians. I don't know any more than that - perhaps it was just a bunch of people who met through church and decided to start a company. Gilchrist, the founder, eventually raised $10 million dollars for the company making it the largest start-up company in Orange County up to that time.

In modern times, I now know that between myself and the Regents of the UC that we probably technically owned 1/2 of that company because of the 'borrowed' F editor source code. But in 1984 it was all quite innocent.

I interviewed to help them with their program and they showed me the database front-end and I thought ... I know this!

It was while working at DayFlo I met my wife-to-be.

Here's an Infoworld Review I found.