From Airline
Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A
History of the Software Industry
by Martin
Campbell-Kelly
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2003
392 pp., illus. 24 b/w. Trade, $16.95
ISBN: 0-262-53262-X.
Reviewed by John Knight
User-Lab, Birmingham Institute of Art
and Design
Gosta Green, UK
John.knight@uce.ac.uk
Martin Campbell-Kelly was co-author of
the brilliant Computer: A History of
the Information Machine. The book,
published in 1997, traces the origins
of the computer. The authors uncovered
a fascinating, but hidden story, and brought
key figures (e.g. Ada Lovelace and Grace
Hopper) to a wider audience. This new
book takes a similar tack. It is crammed
with information corroborated with personal
reminiscences.
From Airline Reservations to Sonic
the Hedgehog: A History of the Software
Industry describes the commercial
exploitation of software. It covers 43
years from 1952 to1995. The first computers,
such as ENIAC, had to be programmed in
binary code. Writing machine code is a
formidable task, and programming languages
were developed to increase productivity.
Produced between the 1957 and 1964, the
most influential of these, FORTRAN and
BASIC, enabled programmers to work more
efficiently and to develop useful functionality
for a broad range of applications.
Large-scale military projects such as
the SAGE air defence project bootstrapped
the nascent industry and created a market
for programmers and suppliers. This research
enabled companies such as International
Business Machines (IBM) to move from office
machinery to computing.
However, it took over 10 years for demand
to develop. Increased demand for computers
occurred with hardware reliability, reduced
costs, and the development of useful business
applications. Business-based computer
systems such as SABRE, the airline reservation
system, often involved reshaping military
applications for civilian use.
Campbell-Kelly charts the growth of the
computer industry during
the "go-go"
years of the sixties. This era heralded
a US dominated industry with international
reach. The decade saw the release of groundbreaking
products including IBMs 360 and
the first use of the term "software product."
Despite these advances, the industry faced
a "software crisis" that was characterised
by late delivery and spiraling costs:
"Today we tend to go on for years, with
tremendous investment to find that the
system, which is not well understood to
start with, does not work as anticipated.
We build systems like the Wright brothers
built airplanes . . . build the whole
thing, push it off a cliff, let it crash,
and start over again." (Graham cited in
Naur and Randell, 1969:10)
In order to promote best practice, NATO
convened the first software engineering
conference in 1968. The 1970s began with
IBM unbundling its software.
This process meant that third party vendors
could sell software to IBMs customers.
This strategy led to a growth in the number
of software providers and stock market
speculation that foreshadows the dot.com
boom:
"In the 1970s, the positive effects of
IBMs unbundling decision on the
software industry were overshadowed by
the effects of the crash in computer stocks
and the computer recession of 1970-71.
At the end of the decade, the market for
software products was less than $2 billion.
Nonetheless, the 1970s was the decade
in which the industry was fully shaped
and in which its numerous submarkets were
defined." (p. 161)
As well as a maturing market, the 1970s
crystallised research in the software
user-interface. The personal computer
provided a platform for innovations such
as graphical user interfaces and windowed
applications and promised software that
could be used by anyone. The growth of
the home and small business market resulted
in a gold rush for PC products in the
1980s and a number of technical innovations,
including Object-Oriented Programming.
Through a combination of guile and luck
Microsoft was able to exploit these advances
and established an early industry standard
operating system and office software.
However, Campbell-Kelly points out that,
"As this book has been at pains to point
out, Microsoft still constitutes only
about one-tenth of this extremely fragmented
industry" (p. 264).
The latter part of the book deals with
the struggle to monopolise markets. While
grabbing headlines in anti-trust cases,
some of the most successful and lucrative
software products are relatively obscure.
These include IBMs CICS data communications
programme that processes "20 billion transactions
everyday" (p. 152).
Outsourcing and open source suggest a
more turbulence for the traditional industry
shapers. These factors come into focus
in the last section of the book, which
deals with computer games and has, perhaps,
more in common with the music and film
industries than with the origins of the
software industry in office machinery.
Campbell-Kelly has written a fascinating
book on an engaging but hidden subject.
He is impartial and enthusiastic. There
are some disappointments caused by scoping
such a huge topic. Thus, we are left to
wonder what changes have occurred since
1995 with the growth of Internet and mobile
applications.