CourseInfo LLC, one of the two companies forming Blackboard Inc. was founded in 1997 by Daniel Cane and Stephen Gilfus while at Cornell University.
They joined together to officially form the partnership known as CourseInfo and developed the company into a small course management software provider.
Early on Cane had begun developing web based scripts for professor Cindy van Es at Cornell for her statistics class.
As one of the five supercomputer centers holding up ARPANET—the precursor underpinnings of the internet—Cornell was an early implementation of email, web and technology usage.
[2] In 1996, Cane wrote simple automated scripts for websites for instructors using the Perl programming language and Netscape 2.0.
Originally the Blackboard company began as a consulting firm contracting to the non-profit IMS Global Learning Consortium.