I bought an Apple II computer in July of ’78, and it changed my life. Mitch Kapor, co-founder of Lotus Development Corp: There’s a lot of time to daydream when you’ve got 90 kids in your class. I ended up with a vision of the spreadsheet. I thought, “well, maybe if it was only as easy as it is with word processing, if we had word processing with numbers.” My friend Alan, with his programmable calculator, always beat me, even though I’d run down and had this whole DEC PDP-10 downstairs. If you’re used to doing that kind of stuff on a blackboard, you say, “well, let’s try programming it.” How much do we spend on this? And how much on this? And next year what’s it going to be? You sit in business-school class, and they’re just running numbers.
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Here’s how the story unfolded, according to those who were there.ĭan Bricklin, DEC employee from 1973-1976, and co-founder of Software Arts: Along the way, these firms helped invent the way that business software would be developed, packaged, marketed and sold for decades.īut, ultimately, the lessons they offered were learned only too well by upstarts like Oracle and Microsoft on the west coast, and New York’s IBM would soon reclaim some of the territory it ceded. It provided an opening for startups to create their own operating systems, databases and applications, and a range of Greater Boston startups seized the chance.Ĭullinet became the first pure software company to go public, Software Arts provided the first compelling reason for businesses to buy PCs and Lotus Development grew into one of the biggest tech companies in the world.
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The decision imbued code with economic value for the first time and, by most estimates, gave birth to the software sector. In the modern era of apps, it’s hard to imagine that software once wasn’t considered a business in its own right.Ĭompanies bought or leased room-sized mainframes, and expected the software and services to come along as part of the steep package.īut, under growing antitrust pressures in the late 1960s, the era’s tech giant, IBM, announced that it would “unbundle” software from its hardware business.