Informix 4GL was co-designed by Roger Sippl (founder of Informix ) and Chris Maloney. They combined the elements of Perform (the screen package designed by Betty Chang), Ace (the report writer written by Bill Hedge), and the SQL engine written by Roy Harrington into a Pascal-like language which Informix released in 1986 - the same year that the first ANSI standard for SQL was promulgated.

Informix 4GL complied with the SQL86 standard. I4GL was phenominally successful in the marketplace. More applications were written in I4GL in the 1990s than in any other language.