Geac Computer Corporation, Ltd ( and ) was a producer of enterprise resource planning, performance management, and industry specific software based in
Markham, Ontario. It was acquired by
Golden Gate Capital
Golden Gate Capital is an American private equity firm based in San Francisco. The firm makes investments in a number of select industries, including technology, financial services, retail and industrial, through leveraged buyout transactions, as ...
's
Infor unit in March 2006 for US$1 billion.
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History
Geac was incorporated in March 1971 by Robert Kurt Isserstedt and Robert Angus ("Gus") German.Simcoe County
Simcoe County is located in the central portion of Southern Ontario, Canada. The county is just north of the Greater Toronto Area, stretching from the shores of Lake Simcoe in the east to Georgian Bay in the west. Simcoe County forms part of ...
Board of Education[ to supply onsite accounting and student scheduling. They programmed inexpensive minicomputers to perform tasks that were traditionally done by expensive mainframe computers.
]
Hardware/software
Geac designed additional hardware to support multiple simultaneous terminal connections, and with Dr Michael R Sweet developed its own operating system (named ''Geac'') and own programming
language (OPL)[ led to a contract at Vancouver City Savings Credit Union ("Vancity") in ]Vancouver, British Columbia
Vancouver ( ) is a major city in western Canada, located in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia. As the List of cities in British Columbia, most populous city in the province, the 2021 Canadian census recorded 662,248 people in the ...
, to create a real-time multi-branch online banking system. Geac developed hardware and operating system software to link minicomputer
A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a class of smaller general purpose computers that developed in the mid-1960s and sold at a much lower price than mainframe and mid-size computers from IBM and its direct competitors. In a 1970 survey, ...
s together, and integrated multiple-access disk drives, thereby creating a multi-processor minicomputer with a level of protection from data loss. Subsequently, Geac replaced the minicomputers with a proprietary