Applied Data Research

~ the eulogy ~

Seven engineers left Sperry Rand in 1959 and set up on their own in Princeton, New Jersey. What they had in mind was contract programming, because that was the only way anybody made money writing software then. Software was not something you bought. It arrived with the machine at no separate charge, and the notion that it might carry its own price was not a notion anyone had needed yet.

Autoflow was written in 1965 for RCA mainframes. You fed it a program and it drew the flowchart, which sounds minor until you remember that documentation was mandatory and drawing those charts by hand was somebody's entire week. ADR took it to RCA expecting the manufacturer to license it and bundle it, the way everything worked. RCA said no. So Martin Goetz, the product manager, sold it to end users directly instead, which is generally cited as the first time a piece of software was marketed as a standalone product. That first version found two buyers.

Goetz had filed a patent application on a sorting method in april 1965, and on 23 april 1968 it was granted as US 3,380,029, the first patent ever issued on a computer program. In 1969 ADR sued IBM, on the argument that giving software away with the hardware was not generosity but a way of guaranteeing that no independent software business could ever exist. IBM announced that june it would price software separately from machines. The case settled in 1970 for $1.4 million, with IBM also agreeing to distribute Autoflow.

Every job I have ever been paid for sits on the far side of that settlement. I write software for money, in a country ADR never sold into, on hardware nobody there would recognize, and the reason any of it is a line item at all traces back to a suit filed by a company in New Jersey in 1969. Nobody I work with has heard the name. It is the most invisible kind of inheritance, not a product anyone still runs but the shape of the industry everyone works inside.

~ the dossier ~

~ the second act ~

ADR spent the seventies becoming an ordinary mainframe software house, which in that decade was an excellent business to be in. It picked up Datacom/DB, a database system for IBM iron, and built Ideal on top of it, a fourth generation language whose name unpacked to Interactive Development Environment for an Application's Life. The Librarian handled source control. None of it was famous outside the machine room and all of it sold on long contracts to banks and insurers.

By the mid eighties that was a profitable, unglamorous business worth more to somebody assembling a catalog than to its own shareholders. Ameritech, one of the regional phone companies broken out of the Bell system, bought ADR in 1986 during a push into computing that did not last.

~ the sale ~

Computer Associates bought ADR from Ameritech on 14 october 1988 for $170 million. Five days later, on 19 october, roughly two hundred people were let go. Everyone in the industry knew that method by then. You buy the installed base for the maintenance revenue, then you cut the payroll that arrived with it. The products carried on inside CA for years under new names and new numbers. The company that made them stopped existing.

~ what it started ~

Martin Goetz died on 10 october 2023 at 93, and most of the obituaries led with the patent, because a patent has a number and a date and fits in a headline. The lawsuit is the bigger fact. Before 1969 the software business was consulting, and after it the software business was products, and a product can be copied and sold a hundred thousand times.

ADR never got rich off the thing it proved. It got $1.4 million and an agreement that IBM would resell its flowcharter, then spent eighteen more years as a mainframe vendor before a bigger one bought it and switched the lights off. The industry it argued into existence is worth several trillion dollars and does not know its name.

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