Review of From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry (History of Computing) (Hardcover)

This is a history of the Software Industry. "Software" was coined to distinguish it from hardware; it describes the spirit that activates electronic machines. There are three sectors: software contracting, corporate software products, and mass-market software products (pp.3-8). The book covers events from around 1950 to 1995 in the USA. Chapter 1 gives an overview of the sources available. Chapter 2 tells of the origins of software writing, and its need for high-maintenance. Could errors arise from "one minor change"? Early users cooperated in sharing software. FORTRAN and COBOL became the first standard programming languages. But high costs and slipped schedules became typical. Government support for SAGE helped establish US dominance of the computer industry (p.48). The "Great Society" led to investments in non-defense projects.

Chapter 3 discusses "Programming Services". The established techniques of engineering management filtered into programming projects. Program flowcharts became institutionalized, then flushed away by the "fad for 'structured programming'" (p.69). The boom for software companies in the late 1960s reminds me of the dot-com fever in the late 1990s. All fueled from government spending (p.75, P.80). The arrival of minicomputers around 1970 allowed middling companies to own a computer. Chapter 4 tells about the change to "Software Products". Computers were more plentiful and more powerful (pp.90-91), programmers didn't keep up. Lines of code used increased 1000% every 5 years, the cost of developing quadrupled by 1965. Page 100 discusses flowcharting, whose purpose was to graphically represent a program's operations. Sort of like a condensed slide presentation of a topic. Page 102 tells of a secret machine instruction used to improve sorting speed (what was it?).

Chapter 5 tells how the software industry acquired its current shape, and gives an overview. Software products was a capital goods business. Industry specific software requires in-depth knowledge; in systems software programming skills are critical. The success of CICS can be compared to a system of roads where applications can freely travel (p.151). Chapter 6 discusses the maturing of corporate software packages, and growth through acquisition. It focuses on three large firms that became prominent in the 1990s. Some grew by acquiring smaller firms for their products (diversification). The rise of the relational database had an adverse affect on older database technologies. The use of fully integrated business application software (ERP) created new companies. Pages 182-4 overviews the successes of Computer Associates. A relational database did not require knowledge of the internal structure of the database; ever faster computers masked its relative inefficiency. Sales of SAP R/3 benefited from the "fad for business re-engineering" (p.195). Page 197 explains why SAP is more important that Microsoft.

There are strong parallels with other historical systems, such as railroads to airlines. If the database was bundled with the operating system there would be no independent vendors. European firms were able to pioneer ERP because they not not been locked into "legacy software" (p.199). The remaining chapters discuss the history of the personal computer.



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