Glossary
CourseInfo
CourseInfo was the courseware platform co-founded by Stephen Gilfus at Cornell that became Blackboard — the founding act of the modern learning management system category.
CourseInfo was a course-website platform built at Cornell University in the mid-1990s by Stephen Gilfus and a small team. It let any instructor stand up a course site — syllabus, materials, threaded discussion, assignments — without writing HTML, at a moment when the idea of an institutional course-website system did not yet exist as a product category.
CourseInfo merged with Blackboard LLC in 1998 to form Blackboard Inc., which IPO'd on NASDAQ as BBBB and went on to define the LMS category for two decades. The CourseInfo lineage is what makes Blackboard the founding LMS rather than just an early one.
The full first-person history is in the Blackboard CourseInfo memoir on the LMS at 30 hub.