INDUSTRY TALES

Collecting the stories of companies that created the information age

---

_By Luanne Johnson

One summer Sunday in 1973, on David del Rio’s first day of work at Software AG, the phone rang. A client in Los Angeles was having problems with a trial of Adabas, a database management system developed in Germany and distributed by David’s new employer. Within twenty-four hours, David was on a plane from Virginia to Los Angeles with Dick McGann, an “experienced” Adabas programmer who had been with the company two whole months. David’s promised four to six weeks of training were compressed into an eight-hour flight to California, during which he frantically reviewed documentation—all in German—and asked questions of Dick—usually, “What is this in English?” That night he fell asleep over the manuals, and the next morning he was on site assisting the client.

A COLLECTION OF STORIES
If this story brings a smile to your face, it’s probably because you, too, have a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants, scramble-to-deliver-the-goods story to tell. The information technology industry was built by people who hustled to get the job done despite ever-changing requirements, impossible deadlines, and slim lines of support all around. It was hectic; it was exhilarating; it was crazy. You either loved it or you got out.

The IT Corporate Histories Collection (computerhistory.org/corphist) is a repository for these stories and many more materials that preserve the history of information technology companies. The collection was developed by a partnership of the Computer History Museum, the Charles Babbage Foundation, and the Software History Center (subsequently acquired by the Computer History Museum) and funded by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Through an initiative to use the Internet to preserve the recent history of science and technology, the Sloan Foundation encourages people to record history by telling their personal stories about working on technology projects. The IT Corporate Histories Collection focuses on stories told by people who worked for companies that developed and marketed information technology in all its permutations. The stories range from pithy anecdotes to in-depth descriptions of a company start-up or new product development. While most are memoirs written by the participants, the collection also includes a number of videotaped interviews.

EXPLODING MYTHS
These stories provide great insights into the history of IT companies. Sometimes they serve to explode long-standing industry myths. For example, many in the IT industry have heard the story that Gary Kildall, the founder of Digital Research, Inc., blew off a meeting with “the suits” from IBM regarding licensing the CP/M operating system to go gallivanting in his private airplane. Supposedly the frustrated IBM folks turned to Microsoft’s MS-DOS operating system for their PC, and DRI missed out on the greatest opportunity in the software industry.

Claims and counter-claims about this story have floated about for years. But Curt Geske was there. In his story “DRI and IBM—First Meeting,” Geske tells us the meeting was a rather mundane affair between Dorothy Kildall, who ran the business end of things, and IBM lawyers over the wording of a nondisclosure agreement. IBM made it known that Microsoft already had a contract to do the work and expected DRI to supply them with the full source code for CP/M, which DRI was understandably reluctant to do. DRI and IBM did eventually reach an agreement for IBM to distribute CP/M, but as recounted in Steve Maysonave’s videotaped story, the agreement was structured in a way that gave all the advantage to Microsoft. The outcome was consistent with the legend, but it hinged on the intricacies of contract negotiations rather than on Gary’s preference for flying over attending meetings.

REVEALING INSIGHTS
Other stories in the collection support long-held beliefs. In the 1960s and 1970s, entrepreneurs had many war stories about how IBM—the “evil empire” of the time—was out to crush them. This was a persistent legend that was difficult to authenticate because IBM never had an official objective to crush competition. But stories from those who were there reveal how hard it could be to compete against a company that had such strong market dominance and controlled its customer accounts so effectively.

In “Day One at SAGNA,” Michael Jakes recounts how a client refused to allow him to make copies of a report from a database selection committee that chose Software AG’s Adabas over IBM’s product. The client was so fearful of reprisals from IBM if the results of an analysis unfavorable to IBM leaked out that he allowed Michael, hidden in a conference room, only an hour to make as many handwritten notes as he could.

In another story, “MRX 1270 Terminal Control Unit,” Robert DiMenna describes how IBM engineers provided incomplete interface specifications for their System 360/370 computers, and how the IBM salesmen exaggerated the risks of attaching non-IBM equipment to their computers, thereby retarding sales of the Memorex 1270. Clearly the competitive obstacles were real, whether they were the result of official IBM policies or simply the fallout of IBM’s very focused marketing strategy.

REACHING OUT FOR MEMORIES
Because collecting personal stories was a key objective of the Sloan initiative, developing this collection required extensive outreach to find people who worked for these companies. The stories resulting from this effort are valuable historical source materials. Moreover, the outreach effort resulted in the collection of a large number of documents and other artifacts related to these companies—more than 1,500 documents in the online collection plus hundreds more donated to the Museum archives. The vast majority of these materials came from the personal files of individuals, not from corporate files. Because most of the companies covered by the project are defunct—long since acquired or otherwise out of business—the materials collected from the basements and attics of the participants represent historical information that was at risk of being lost forever.

More than 250 people have contributed everything from handwritten notes to organization charts to marketing brochures to network schematics—the whole hodgepodge of materials that employees of these companies saved for whatever reasons were important to them at the time. The Cincom collection includes marketing materials from the late 1960s that explain to potential customers what a database is and why you need one. Compare that to the Informix marketing brochure from the mid-1990s, which tells a fanciful tale of how Napoleon used the Informix OnLine DBMS to win the battle of Waterloo. In the intervening decades, database marketing materials had shifted from explanations of what the product was to attention-getting tactics.

The materials collected are critical to documenting the history of the industry that began to transform the world in the last half of the twentieth century. Thanks to the IT Corporate Histories Collection, they are being preserved to enlighten and inspire many generations to come.