Projects

This page describes projects currently being undertaken by the Computer History Museum's Software Industry Special Interest Group as well as projects undertaken by its predecessor organizations, the Computer History Museum's Software Business History Committee, the Software History Center and the IT Corporate Histories Project.

The Software Industry SIG is a collection, preservation and outreach organization, associated with the Computer History Museum which has both a museum and an archive. We serve as an information resource about the industry's history and as a focal point for efforts by volunteers and historians. Over the past seven years, we have carried out a number of projects in cooperation with various other history-oriented organizations:

• Software Corporate Histories Project--Luanne Johnson and a number of company facilitators will be continuing their work as part of the Software Industry SIG to capture information about significant companies in the software industry through online entries and scanned materials and references to other materials in the Computer History Museum or other archives. The current goal is to enhance the collection of information from the 21 companies already in the data base and to add additional companies. The online collection software developed by the IT Corporate Histories Project is being extended to allow collections by individuals and on topics of broad significance.
  IT Corporate Histories Project Website

• Collections--Since 2000 the Software History Center and now the Software Industry SIG have had a proactive collections effort, headed up by primarily by Doug Jerger. A number of important collections have been donated to the Charles Babbage Institute including the ADAPSO files, the Milton Wessel papers and the Larry Welke materials. More recently files have been contributed to the Computer History Museum from Larry Schoenberg, Werner Frank and Tom O'Rourke. With the incorporation of the work done by the Software Corporate Histories facilitators into this program we can now include on the list significant contributions from individuals associated with Aldus, Cincom Systems, Inc., Computer Usage Company, Digital Research Inc. (DRI), GE Information Systems (GEIS), Informix, Ingres, Ross Systems, Software AG, and Tymshare, as well as numerous smaller donations from other individuals and companies. We are continuing this active collections program.

• Software Industry SIG Website--This website provides information about companies founded during the industry's formative years, including the date of founding, founders' name, products/services, markets served and other details. It also includes a list of people who played significant roles in the industry's development. The plan is to integrate this collection of historical materials into the Software Corporate Histories Collection and to refocus the Software Industry SIG Website on providing information about the activities of the SI SIG to its members, the Computer History Museum community, and the general public.

• Oral Histories Program--Initiated in 2002 with David Allison of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, this program has expanded over the years and has now provided interviews with almost 50 software industry pioneers. Integrating the Software Corporate Histories Collection into this program adds an additional twelve oral histories to the collection. We plan to continue the program to insure that we capture the recollections of a significant number of the principal industry leaders from the 1950s through the 1980s. The transcripts are posted either at the Charles Babbage Institute or the Computer History Museum websites. One special objective over the next two years is to have Luanne Johnson edit and post the over 40 interviews which she conducted prior to 2000 of various software industry leaders.
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• IEEE Annals of Computing History--Burton Grad and Paul Ceruzzi of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum have recently co-edited a special issue of the Annals on the history of PC Word Processing. This was published in November 2006 as Volume 28 Number 4. The issue has important articles by historians Thomas Haigh and Tim Bergin. It also includes recollections from Seymour Rubinstein, the founder of MicroPro and commentaries by Ed Bride, Seymour Merrin and Amy Wohl, all important contributors to the growth of the word processing usage of personal computers. And the same co-editors are working on a second special issue of the Annals targeted for publication in summer 2007 to cover the history of spreadsheets and other financial programs on the PC. One very important source for the material in these special issues has come from the PC Software meetings that were conducted in 2004. In 2002, Software History Center co-founders Luanne Johnson and Burton Grad served as guest editors for a special issue of Annals (Vol. 24, No. 1). This issue focused on the start of the software products industry in the 1960s. It includes recollections from 13 software entrepreneurs, perspectives of IBM executives on unbundling, and articles by eminent computer historians. This is the first time most of the material has been made available to the computer history community.
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• Meetings and Workshops--The Software Industry SIG has conducted two more meetings during the first six months of 2007 which will include workshops and oral histories. The first was held on March 29-30, 2007 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. This meeting was being chaired by Grace Gentry and Burt Grad and was focused on the NACCB, a trade association of professional services firms which primarily used independent contractors to carry out their custom programming assignments. The second session has been conducted on June 12-13, 2007 which has covered the history of Relational Data Base Management Systems, specifically on five principal companies which contributed to the dramatic growth of this industry sector (IBM, Oracle, Ingres, Informix and Sybase. Two more meeting are planned for the 7/1/07 through 6/30/08 period. One will focus on Minicomputer Software. It will concentrate on the independent software companies which produced technical and commercial application software for minicomputers from DEC, DG and HP. The current schedule is to conduct this meeting the fall of 2007. The second meeting will be held in Washington, DC and will focus on the those professional services companies which primarily provided programming and system integration services for the US and other government agencies.

• PC Software Meetings--The Software History Center conducted two meetings in 2004 on the history of PC Software. The first meeting was held in Needham, MA in May and the second at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA in November. Between the two meetings there were close to 100 participants including 40 industry pioneers and more than a dozen computer historians. There were 16 workshops and 25 oral histories conducted at these two day meetings. Two key subjects were the history of spreadsheets and of word processing software. The founders involved in VisiCalc and in Lotus 1-2-3 were present as well as the founder of MicroPro, the producer of WordStar. The transcripts of the oral histories from the Needham meeting are (or will be) available at www.cbi.umn.edu and the transcripts from the November meeting are (or will be) available at www.computerhistory.org.  The transcripts of the workshops are in the process of being edited and will be published on line on the Computer History Museum website and possibly in print form during 2007.

• Professional Services Workshop--In February 2006 the Software Industry SIG conducted a meeting at the Computer History Museum for pioneers who had founded computer professional services companies during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The companies principally worked in the commercial custom software sector. There were 10 industry pioneers in attendance along with close to 10 historians. The transcripts of the four oral histories from this meeting and the transcript of the workshop are all available at www.computerhistory.org.

• "One for the History Books" Workshop--This workshop, held in Palo Alto, CA, in September, 2000, assembled a group of thirty software pioneers to talk about their experiences as company founders in the 1960s and early 1970s. A transcript of the "One for the History Books" workshop is available from the Software Industry SIG.

• ADAPSO History Project--Our goal was to preserve the history of ADAPSO, a trade association representing computer software and services companies, which was established in 1961. ADAPSO changed its name to the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) in 1991. We worked with the Charles Babbage Institute (CBI) at the University of Minnesota to archive materials which document the history of ADAPSO/ITAA and make them available to researchers. In addition, we collected oral histories from former and current members about their involvement in ADAPSO/ITAA programs. This effort took place at a reunion of former ADAPSO members held May 3 & 4, 2002, in Washington, DC. ITAA, CBI, the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing and the Smithsonian National Museum of American History were co-sponsors of this meeting. The ADAPSO Reunion Transcript of this meeting is available at the Computer History Museum in a book written by Luanne Johnson from the transcripts of the workshops held at that meeting. Oral Histories from that meeting are available at www.cbi.umn.edu.
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• ADAPSO History Research Project--The Software History Center engaged Thomas Haigh, a young historian in the computer field to conduct a research project using the ADAPSO materials which had been collected. After working for a summer at the Charles Babbage Institute, Dr. Haigh published two articles for the IEEE Annals of Computing History based on his study and provided profiles of a number of the ex-presidents of ADAPSO.

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