The current chairs of the Software Industry SIG are:
Mike Humphries, Co-chair
I first entered the computer industry as a computer timesharing customer while working at Fairchild Semiconductor in market research and planning and product marketing for digital products. It only took a few months using this (at the time) state of the art technology to realize that is what I wanted to do for a career. Five years with Tymshare (a public computer timesharing services company) as a field application consultant, salesman and district manager introduced me to the whole world of how people, departments and companies needed and used computing. Since that happy start I have been fortunate to be at some of the most significant, interesting and successful software and services companies around; including five years at Oracle starting from when we were only $12 M in sales in 1984! And UNIX was a new and as yet unaccepted thing. I have served in roles as VP of Sales, Sales and Marketing, VP of Operations and COO of several technology firms. Now I am the Managing Director of Turn Eight Group, a Los Altos, California based organization that helps our tech clients who anticipate or are experiencing revenue challenges build and execute solutions.
I have been involved in the Software Industry Special Interest Group for over 10 years contributing to the Timesharing, RDBMS and IT Corporate History projects. My home is in Palo Alto, California just a short ride down 101 from the Computer History Museum. I have a degree is in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. You can reach me at mhumphries.sisig@gmail.com
Ann Hardy, Co-chair
Ann Hardy
My career in the Computer Software Industry began in June 1956 at IBM World Headquarters in New York City. I started their six-week class in programming which was designed to make us capable of helping customers. It was amazing. We covered wiring boards to do payroll with a 407 printer, as well as programming the 650 and the 705. Then, my first job was in Research, programming the 704 to optimize circuits. By 1958 I had transferred to the Stretch (7030) project in Poughkeepsie where I was on the team to implement Fortran, and later managed a group developing software for the Harvest Project. In 1961 I took a year to study at Berkeley. By the summer of 1962 a Stretch had arrived at Livermore Labs, and I gave up New York winters for California.
The Labs soon developed a timesharing system which, for a programmer, was quickly addicting – no more boxes of cards to carry and worry about dropping. But the system at the Lab was limited to use at the Lab for security reasons. In late 1965 when I saw an announcement about Tymshare’s plans, I had to investigate. I made an appointment expecting to lease a TTY for my home. It turned out that they didn’t even have a computer yet so I applied for a job they didn’t know they would have – writing the operating system/kernel. I started with Tymshare in February 1966, just a few months before the SDS 940 computer arrived. From my home I was soon connected via a TTY to the ‘Cloud’. It was an amazing opportunity to go from the fifth employee to a Vice President in a company that eventually made the Fortune 500. Once the OS settled down I started managing a group that developed and/or found applications for our customers that could take advantage of computing in the ‘Cloud’ on a world-wide network, Tymnet. Before McDonnell Douglas acquired Tymshare in 1984 we were marketing, among many others, applications for engineering design, airline reservations, bill-paying, and of course email, all of which were available throughout Europe, Japan and other countries.
Shortly after the acquisition by McDonnell Douglas, I started Key Logic, with many of the technical staff who had expertise in computer security. Then, took a break in 1992 to travel, and came back in 1994 to start Agorics from which I retired in 2004. I have been as supportive of the SI SIG as time has permitted over the years, and am delighted to be back working with the team. My email is ann.sisig@gmail.com
Past Leadership:
Burt and Luanne started and led the Software Industry Special Interest Group for 15 years, during which time many significant milestones were achieved. Including establishing process and methodologies for gathering software history, editing and arranging the results and the resulting accumulation of many oral histories, industry workshops, IT Corporate Histories and a wealth of other material covering important parts of how software has evolved as an industry. Without their leadership and many years of hard work there would not be a Software Industry Special Interest Group.
Burton Grad, Co-chair Emeritus
Burt Grad has been working on computer software since 1954 when he wrote the first production and inventory control programs for the General Electric Company’s installation of a Univac I computer at Louisville, Kentucky. He worked for IBM on scientific and application programs during the 1960s, was part of IBM’s Unbundling Task Force in 1969 and then was development director for various industries, including initial responsibility for CICS. Since forming his own consulting company in 1978, he has been performing strategic planning and valuation studies for computer software and services companies. Burt was heavily involved in ADAPSO/ITAA from the early 1970s and co-founded the Software History Center with Luanne Johnson in 2000. He is a graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and lives in Westport, CT. He can be reached at burtgrad@aol.com
Luanne Johnson, Co-chair Emeritus
Luanne Johnson has over thirty years experience in the information technology industry. In 1971, she founded a software company, Argonaut Information Systems, Inc., and ran it successfully for fifteen years. From 1986 until 1994, she worked for the Information Technology Association of America (formerly ADAPSO), a national trade association representing companies in the IT industry, serving as Executive Director of the ADAPSO Foundation and then as ITAA President. In 2000, she and Burt Grad co-founded The Software History Center, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the history of the software industry. She was then President of the Charles Babbage Foundation and subsequently became the Principal Investigator for the IT Corporate Histories Project. She can be reached at luanne.i.johnson@gmail.com