[6] He became a manager at the Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation in charge of a unit with 400 employees and two computers, an IBM 704 and a UNIVAC 1103A, and in 1958 joined the merged Thompson Ramo Wooldridge company.

[11] Working with pioneers of scientific computing such as David M. Young, Jr. and George Forsythe, Frank published several important articles on numerical analysis in Journal of the ACM and other publications.

[19] The co-founder of Data Products, Erwin Tomash (1921–2012),[20] was from Minnesota and had earlier worked at Engineering Research Associates, a pioneering computer firm from the 1950s.

[25] However, in France, the term "informatique" soon became a generic name, meaning the modern science of information handling, and would become accepted by the Académie française as an official French word.

[16] Informatics, Inc. began operations on March 19, 1962, in Frank's empty house in Woodland Hills[16] in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles.

[16] An important early hire was Frank Wagner, a North American Aviation executive who was past president of the IBM user group SHARE and had many contacts among that community.

[29] An early description of the company used in press releases was "Informatics provides analysis, design and consulting services for users of digital processing equipment.

"[29] Meanwhile, Data Products, which had moved its office to Sherman Oaks, California in 1964 and renamed itself slightly to Dataproducts,[9][31] was suffering from falling behind IBM on disk drive technology; its eventually successful printer business had not yet taken off.

[60] Informatics had hopes for the ICS IV becoming a strategic product for them, and while it was sold to General Foods and Japanese National Railways, it proved a very high-priced, low-volume market and there was an effort to find a less expensive alternative.

[67] In 1971, Informatics and The Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States announced a joint venture, Equimatics, Inc., headed by Werner Frank, that would develop and sell computer-related products for the insurance industry.

[33] Additional products included Life-Comm and Issue-Comm for the insurance sector, Minicomm and Intercomm for teleprocessing and communications, and CSS, for corporate shareholder processing.

[76] Mark IV was a batch processing, early fourth-generation programming language that combined file management and upkeep with report generation capabilities.

[77] One taxonomy of application generators published in a scholarly setting placed Mark IV in the category of "Generalized file-management systems and sophisticated report writers".

One of these was RADCOL at Rome Air Development Center (site of some of Informatics's earliest contracts); this was short for RADC Automatic Document Classification On-Line, which ran from the late 1960s into the mid-1970s.

The program for redesign of the Goldstone antenna used what came to be called a hill climbing algorithm and was given special recognition by NASA in the form of a small monetary prize for its developers.

[118] It was followed by Answer/DB, a product introduced in 1981, that allowed end users at terminals to make queries against various files and IMS databases on the same IBM mainframe operating systems.

[125] William D. Plumb was a pioneer of electronic data interchange who began thinking about it while at a Columbus, Ohio-based firm known as Management Horizons.

[127] In 1975 Informatics had arranged with the National Wholesale Druggists' Association to create a central clearinghouse for the processing of electronic purchase orders within the industry.

"[127] The Terminal Application Processing System, known as TAPS, had been created by a Midtown Manhattan-based firm named Decision Strategy Corporation,[135] which was founded by Michael J.

[136] Intended to significantly reduce the development time for online, CRT terminal-based applications, TAPS had been around since 1974[137] and initially ran on IBM mainframes under the CICS teleprocessing monitor and the TCAM access method.

[140] At this time some 70 percent of TAPS sales were to other companies doing software development, such as McCormack & Dodge and On-Line Systems, Inc.,[141] in what the firm said was a deliberate strategy to first market the product to customers who would be "the toughest test of all".

[142] Freedom from vendor-specific databases and data communications were desirable qualities in application generators,[144] and Informatics continued to stress the portability of TAPS across different hardware, operating systems, and terminal models.

[162] In particular it offered a legal support service that assisted law firms with large-scale document maintenance and retrieval functions in complex litigation efforts.

[168] Continuing to sell the Wang-based Legal Time Management System turnkey solution,[169] the Phoenix division had yearly revenues on the order of $30 million by the mid-1980s.

[170] It would claim in advertisements in the ABA Journal to have 30 of the largest 100 law firms as customers and to be the top supplier of integrated legal word and data processing systems.

[179] Werner Frank had a parting of the ways with Informatics management and left the company at the end of 1982, with some acrimonious relations taking place between him and Bauer.

[192] Wyly had a controversial background with both successes and failures, the latter including a $100 million loss in attempting to establish Datran, a U.S. nationwide digital network in direct competition with AT&T.

[193][194] When that too was rejected, the acquisition attempt became an overt hostile takeover that was later described by one Informatics executive as "an all-out war", with both financial interests and pure ego driving it.

[4][196] (In Bauer's later rueful estimation, the main beneficiaries of the takeover struggle were lawyers and investment bankers, who received millions of dollars in fees no matter the outcome.

[4] Furthermore, the fact that trading on the stock on Wall Street had become quite heavy, with some 70 percent of its issue changing hands during the battle, led to Bauer concluding that the company's shareholders actually did want to be acquired.