The Software Industry Special Interest Group depends on financial and volunteer support to accomplish its objectives. To inquire about supporting the SI SIG as a volunteer, please contact us at softwareindustrysig@gmail.com. To make a financial contribution, send a check payable Read More …
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 Read More …
The Software Industry Special Interest Group (SI SIG) is a part of the Computer History Museum and is dedicated to preserving the history of the software Industry. This effort began in 1997 as a web site created by Luanne Johnson Read More …
Mission The Software Industry Special Interest Group (SI SIG) is dedicated to preserving for future generations information about the companies, people, products, and events that shaped the computer software and services industry. Goals Identify where materials documenting the industry’s early Read More …
Howard Webber describes his work over the years in developing a system to a comprehensive spell checker to be used in producing a world class dictionary which could be used to drive spell checking. He also talks about how this Read More …
Bruce Peterson describes his experiences at Hughes Aircraft as a programmer on the Hughes Labor System and the problems from some of the short-cut assumptions built in from the use of punched cards. He also describes techniques that he introduced Read More …
Bob Patrick traces the evolution of operating systems from his early work on CPCs and the first IBM scientific computers through the GMR-NAA system and the development of SOS, IBSYS and the Direct Couple to the IBM OS/360. Read Bob’s Read More …
Jerry Koory describes his experience in the mid-1960s while working for PRC in developing a comprehensive system for a Title Insurance company to manage the records for both real property transfers and related court actions. This system was an early Read More …
Burton Grad describes his experience designing and programming a manufacturing control system in 1954 for the Dishwasher and Disposer Department of GE in Louisville, KY to run on the first Univac I computer sold for commercial use (as against government Read More …
Uri Berman worked with Pete Nordyke at Rockwell’s Space Division on a massive parts list application for the Apollo space capsule. They had the idea of separating the disk access and recovery functions from the applications programs which accessed the Read More …
As we mentioned, a viable commercial computer timesharing requires a reliable and ubiquitous means to connect many remote users to that computer. Which implies a network. Which implies routing. But what do you do when you’re developing one of the world’s Read More …
As we mentioned previously, the origin of cloud computing was computer timesharing, a service created in the 1970’s. To be viable, commercial computer timesharing requires two technologies: the first is a computer capable of serving many simultaneous users such that Read More …
As I mentioned in a previous post, Fairchild Market Research and Planning (MRP) had elected to write computer applications themselves for 1) association reporting commitments and 2) in-house data analysis and custom reports. There was a MRP department employee who Read More …
Today’s Cloud provides resources, access and data that makes it indispensable. But virtually none of the services that evolved to today’s Cloud existed before computer timesharing came into being and became available to the end user computing population. Computer timesharing? Read More …
“The Cloud” has slightly different meanings for different people and in different contexts. But in most cases it is the term for the rich and powerful environment that provides access to applications, content and data from resources most of us Read More …
The Information Technology Corporate Histories Collection was created under a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The SI SIG’s predecessor, the Software History Center, partnered with the Computer History Museum and the Charles Babbage Foundation to administer the grant to Read More …
Our mission to preserve the history of the software industry includes encouraging organizations and individuals who have historical materials in their files to donate those materials to an archival organization where they can be preserved for the future and also Read More …
EEE Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 35 Number 2, April-June 2013 This special issue (part 2 of a series which began with the special issue in October–December 2012) tells the history of how IBM and several new, independent software Read More …
IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 34 Number 4, October-December 2012 This Annals special issue tells the story of how the transformation to RDBMSs began and describes how three companies pioneered the development of relational database management products Read More …
IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 31 Number 4, October-December 2009 This issue is focused on the products, companies, and people who designed, programmed, and sold mainframe DBMS software products beginning in the 1960s and 1970s. It includes Read More …