skip to main content

1991-1994: The Pre-Web Years

The ‘search engine that could’ gains momentum across the U.S. and beyond

1994

  • Release of the OpenText 4 search engine.
  • Customers include Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Oregon, the Ontario Legislative Assembly (Hansard), Caterpillar, General Dynamics and Grolier Publishing.
  • Tom Jenkins joins the company as COO—later to become President, CEO, and Executive Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer

1993

  • First Windows-based applications to UBS delivered in Switzerland.
  • Expands U.S. presence through alliance with Infodata Systems and its environmental database, EarthLaw.

1992

  • Delivers CD-ROM for the Canadian Pharmaceutical Association.
  • Nissho Iwai becomes an OpenText distributor in Japan.
  • Release of PAT 3, Lector and PatMotif.

1991

  • The company's full-text indexing and string-search technology evolves out of innovative Oxford English Dictionary (OED) project at the University of Waterloo
  • OED project results in a search engine that supports SGML, and searches user-defined document structures without loss of performance
  • OpenText incorporates in June 1991; starts shipping product in September
  • Customers include Oxford University Press, the Canadian Pharmaceutical Association, and University libraries