mbp (Mathematischer Beratungs- und Programmierungsdienst)

~ the last words ~

On 26 February 1957, in Dortmund, fourteen companies signed up to pay for a computing service none of them could afford on its own. The idea came from a mathematician, Hans Konrad Schuff, backed by Gerhard Ahl at the city labor office and by the Dortmund chamber of commerce. They called the result the Mathematischer Beratungs- und Programmierungsdienst, the mathematical consulting and programming service, which everybody immediately shortened to mbp. Its first office was at Kleppingstraße 26.

The founding date sits twenty seven years ahead of my own birth and forty one years ahead of the first time I dialed up from Ankara. By the time I had touched a computer at all, mbp had been sold and folded into an American outsourcer. So this one is pure reconstruction. It is worth reconstructing because 1957 is early enough that German business had no settled word for software, and the company spent its first decade explaining what it was selling.

It grew slowly and then not slowly. Revenue in 1959 was 46,000 marks with twenty two people. By 1961 it was 940,000 marks with thirty six, which is twenty times the money on less than double the staff, and is roughly what it looks like when a service finds its market. By the late 1980s there were about 750 employees.

~ the record ~

~ fourteen companies ~

The founder list is the most interesting document in the story, because it is a photograph of what the Ruhr was in 1957. Hoesch AG, the steel company, was the largest of them. Around it stood Rheinstahl Union Brückenbau and the Gelsenkirchener Bergwerks-AG from heavy industry, the engineering firm Friedrich Uhde, the machine builder Orenstein & Koppel, the Dortmund city utilities and the regional power company VEW, the Burgardt & Bröckelschen bank, a department store called Kaufhaus Küster, and the Dortmund-Hamm consumer cooperative. A steelworks and a grocery co-op were buying computing time from the same supplier, three decades before anyone would think to call that arrangement a service.

The work followed the ownership. Wikipedia's account has the first job coming from the Hörder Hüttenunion, converting punched-card processes to a computer. Within a generation mbp had moved a long way from the blast furnaces: by its twenty fifth anniversary in 1982 it had worked on both Spacelab and AWACS, with the federal criminal police among its other customers. Later customers included the Bundeswehr, the Fraunhofer institutes, the federal motor transport authority and the Bundespost. Its own products ran from a COBOL compiler written in the late 1960s, which it was still selling into the 1990s under the name Visual, through Teletex controllers and Bildschirmtext software to the ROHR2 pipe statics package.

~ mutters bestes pferd ~

Hoesch ended up owning it, and inside Hoesch the three letters acquired a joke expansion. Computerwoche put it in a headline on 5 March 1982 for the twenty fifth anniversary, calling the Hoesch subsidiary "mutters bestes pferd". Mother's best horse. The company had started with two people and expected to hire its five hundredth that year. In the same period it described itself as the oldest software house in Germany, which is a claim it made for itself; the stronger version you will see today, that it was the first in Europe, comes from Wikipedia rather than from any source of the period.

Then the Ruhr changed. Krupp took over Hoesch, and the software subsidiary went out with the restructuring. German Wikipedia puts the sale to EDS in 1992; Computerwoche reported it on 8 January 1993 under the headline "Outsourcer verstärkt Projektgeschäft: EDS Deutschland übernimmt Hoesch-Softwaretochter mbp", and described EDS as taking over mbp Software & Systems GmbH in the shape it had after the restructuring just completed. At that point mbp was turning over about 112 million marks, seventeen million less than the year before, with 560 people spread across three companies all called mbp.

What makes this an awkward grave is that the name did not end on 8 January 1993. EDS kept using it, moved the operation into a new building in 1998, and no source anywhere names the day the three letters came off the door. The nearest thing to a second ending is 24 April 2008, when EDS gave up the Dortmund site entirely and moved to Essen, with some of the original mbp people still working in it until that day. On 24 September 2016 a memorial plaque went up at Kleppingstraße 26, which is how a city marks a software company that outlived the steel companies that paid to start it.

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