A view from the 1960s: how the software industry began

The conventional wisdom in the computer industry in the 1960s was that one could not make any money selling software-it was either given away free by the computer manufacturers or written specifically and uniquely for each computer installation. But several years before the concept of charging for software products was given legitimacy by IBM's unbundling in June 1969, there were a number of entrepreneurs who were convinced that there was a market for software that could be sold off-the-shelf over and over again to hundreds of customers. The companies founded by these software pioneers grew to become enterprises worth hundreds of millions of dollars and were the prototypes for the thousands of software companies that came after them. The article tells the story of two of those early companies, Applied Data Research and Informatics, and the contributions they made to the creation of today's multibillion dollar software industry.