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From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog
From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog is a history of the software industry in the United States, down to 1995. It avoids technical details -- there's little about software engineering and programming languages, for example, or developments in computer science -- to focus on the economic and business accompaniments of technological change. And Campbell-Kelly is an academic historian, providing full references and a discussion of sources and avoiding hype or dramatisation. But From Airline Reservations is never heavy going: the less interesting tables can easily be skipped over, the references are out of the way as endnotes, and short, focused case studies make for compelling reading.
An introduction discusses industry statistics, other sources, and the restriction to the United States. The basic structure is then chronological and sectoral, with a three sector division into software contracting, corporate software products, and mass-market software products.
Two chapters cover software contracting. In the 1950s, IBM's Technical Computing Bureau and SHARE user groups were important players and FORTRAN and COBOL were developed. The Systems Development Corporation, set up to produce software for the national defense network (SAGE) required thousands of programmers and became a kind of "programming university," while the SABRE airline reservations system was the most important civilian project. As well as large systems integrators there were small software contractors, some of which were to grow rapidly.
The 1960s saw consolidation, with an increasing need for marketing and project management skills as well as casualties from a computer "utility" fad (early Application Service Providers) and the computer stocks crash of 1970. New firms continually appeared, however, with high turnover. Coverage of software contracting stops there, with a closing comment that: "Software contracting remains the most popular way of participating in the software industry, programming services enterprises outnumbering software products firms by 2 or 3 to 1."
There are three chapters on the software products industry. The first covers its origins between 1965 and 1970, with extended case studies of two leading products: ADR's Autoflow (flow-charting) and Informatics' Mark IV (file management). The significance of IBM's 1969 unbundling of hardware and software is also treated at length.
Next comes a survey of software products through the 1970s. These were classified by supplier (computer manufacturers and independent vendors, with some turnkey vendors, software brokers, and time-sharing services) and by category. The latter included systems (database systems, IBM's CICS, Unix) industry-specific (banking, manufacturing), and cross-industry (accounting, office automation, CAD) software. Campbell-Kelly suggests that the increasingly fine classification of software was itself significant.
The period from 1980 to 1995 saw "the United States' lead in software products become seemingly invincible." This is illustrated with case studies of IBM (a manufacturer) and three big independent vendors: Computer Associates (a consolidator), Oracle (databases), and SAP (ERP software). One reason for the success of the latter, a German company, was that European companies lagged those in the United States and had not yet invested in company-specific software.
Then come three chapters on the personal computer software industry. The first covers the pioneer period from 1975 to 1983, beginning with the origins of the microcomputer and the "first mover" advantage in operating systems held by Digital Research and then Microsoft. Also covered are programming languages and VisiCalc and other productivity software packages. In production and distribution "there was almost no point of contact between the booming microcomputer software industry and [that] for corporate mainframes and minicomputers."
The second chapter continues the story down to 1995. Much of this involves Microsoft, of course, but the chapter title is "Not Only Microsoft" and Campbell-Kelly argues that it has received disproportionate attention. Topics covered include the IBM PC standard, Autodesk and AutoCAD, the race for a GUI, battles between Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel and between WordPerfect and Microsoft Word, Adobe, and others. Success in the PC software industry came not just from luck, but from exploitation, deliberate or not, of the economics of increasing returns.
A third chapter looks at home and recreational software, in particular at games (and game consoles), CD-ROM encyclopedias, and personal finance software (Quicken versus Microsoft Money). Here Campbell-Kelly sees "a historical trend for software to become subordinate to the intellectual content or the complementary services offered".
Campbell-Kelly himself is British and there are occasional references to British and European companies, but the focus is on the United States. A final chapter looks at reasons for the success of the U.S. software industry: an early start and market size, clustering effects, and government support for R&D.
On "political" issues, Campbell-Kelly takes a more positive view of Microsoft than some: "Microsoft's monopolies and abuses do not seem any worse than some of the others described in this book." He also ignores free software completely, which is perhaps reasonable given the end-point in 1995, though the GNU Project and its antecedents would have made a interesting topic -- and hindsight suggests that the idea of free software was more significant than any specific product.
From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog should command a wide audience: participants in the industry, both programmers and managers, students of economics and business, and the interested general public.
Danny's book reviews cover many other business, computing, and economic history titles. You can purchase Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
"From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog is a history of the software industry in the United States, down to 1995. It avoids technical details"
Technical details like "Sonic is a product of the Japanese softawre industry"...
I've exchanged mail with one of the Slashdot guys on the topic of reviews before. He specifically said that they don't like to post the bad reviews.
It's sad that the author didn't focus on OSS. How few times in the history of any industry did a group of people actually force huge companies to focus on increasing quality without a lawsuit. Many of the big companies didn't care what they forced on users until open source software came along and made them and us remember why competition is a good thing.
Ummm...
That doesn't look very American to me.
Before there was a software industry, software was effectively free from hardware manufacturers
Apples and oranges. The whole reason the software could be "given" away was that the two were sold as a package. People bought "systems" and "solutions" and a "cheap" system was six figures. Plus then the cost of software was easily subsidized by the hardware and support costs. You're referring to a completely different model and you can't compare that to the pc and current software.
But Bill Gates and the industry has become entrenched to the point that the notion of software one doesn't have to pay for seems novel.
The software industry was well entrenched even without Bill's help. Plus, one ALWAYS pays. Except for people who are working on "commercial" OSS, what do these programmers working on "other" OSS projects do to pay the bills. The vast majority of them write software that costs money. A "free" software market can't support itself, it is way to resource intensive. It has to be buoyed by something.
You make a good point. On the other hand, I'd really rather hear about good books rather than books that suck. There's no way I can read even a tiny fraction of a percent of the books that are published. A negative review isn't necessary to convince me not to read a particular book; that's my default action anyway (and that of everyone else).
While I enjoy a good slagging as much as the next person, positive reviews are ultimately more helpful to me in wading through the torrent of books emanating from the publishing industry.
I guess the exception would be when a sucky book/CD/movie/game gets overly hyped. In that case, a negative review could be very useful.
Interestingly I was just playing with old media this last rainy weekend, and a 1983 copy of MultiMate (Word processor) run just fine on an 180Mhz pentium once I put the 1.2Mb 5.25" floppy disk in. It had no idea of the 'fixed' disk, kept asking to insert disk for drive b: etc.
I'd love to find: PL/M-8 (pl/m for the 8008) and a SCELBAL book.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
As a former employee of SDC (late 70's to early 80's), the correct name is "System Development Corporation", not "Systems Development Corporation". This is because the company was spun out of Rand to develop one system; the first computer system for NORAD. SDC disappeared in the 80's after Burroughs bought it. There was a free software community back then. An informal group of people in organizations with Unix source licenses swapped tapes. There was an "informal" national Unix users group meeting the summer I graduated from UCLA; I remember playing with the tape from that meeting.