In 2000, Luanne Johnson and Burton Grad co-founded the Software History Center to collect, preserve and communicate the history of the computer software industry. They were concerned that the information and recollections from the 1950s through the 1980s were at risk of being lost because of the sale of so many companies and the aging of the people who had formed and built the companies, the products and the services. In January of 2005, the Software History Center became part of the Computer History Museum and changed its name to the Software Business History Committee. At the beginning of 2007, the SBHC merged its activities with the software portion of the Information Technology Corporate Histories Project to form the Software Industry Special Interest Group within the Computer History Museum.
Over the past seven years, the Software History Center and its succeeding incarnations have arranged meetings and workshops on mainframe software, on PC software and on Professional Services, edited two special issues of the IEEE Annals of Computing History, produced a book on the history of ADAPSO, organized over 40 oral histories of industry pioneers and collected materials from more than 10 software industry pioneers. The SI SIG is currently active in following up on the Information Technology Corporate Histories Project, organizing meetings on the brokerage-type of Professional Services companies and on Minicomputer Software companies, conducting 10 more oral histories and collecting additional materials from industry pioneers and key software companies and affiliated organizations. For more information about the SI SIG go to www.softwarehistory.org.
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PC Financial and Management Software workshop at the PC Software Conference, organized by the Software History Center, November 19, 2004. Shown here (clockwise from the lower left corner): Thomas Haigh, Jan Phillips, Robert Carr, Gib Hoxie, Luanne Johnson, Paul Ceruzzi, Mitch Kapor, Lee Keet and Ken Ross. |
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