Founded | 1959 |
---|---|
Founder | Martin Goetz, Sherman Blumenthal, Ellwood Kauffman, Dave McFadden, Bernard Riskin, Robert Wickenden, and Stephen Wright |
Defunct | 1986 |
Fate | Acquired |
Successor | Ameritech |
Headquarters | , |
Services | independent contract programming |
Applied Data Research, Inc. (ADR), was a large software vendor from the 1960s until the mid-1980s. ADR is often described as "the first independent software vendor". [1]
Founded in 1959, ADR was originally a contract development company. ADR eventually built a series of its own products. ADR's widely used major packages included: Autoflow for automatic flowcharting, which is often cited as one of the first commercial software applications; [2] Roscoe, a remote job submission environment; MetaCOBOL, an extensible macro processor for the COBOL language; and The Librarian, for source-code management.
The company's original office was in a small office building along U.S. Route 206 in Princeton Township, New Jersey. [3] Later during the 1960s, they were part of a data center located on Route 206 across from Princeton Airport. The center was destroyed by fire in 1969 when a light plane crashed into it on approach to the airport, but there were no serious injuries among either the pilot or the workers in the building. [4] In 1980, the company moved to a facility further along Route 206, that was just north of Princeton in Montgomery Township, New Jersey. [5]
ADR received the first patent issued for a computer program, a sorting system, on April 23, 1968. [6] The program was developed by Martin Goetz. [7] In this effort, ADR enlisted support of the Association of Data Processing Service Organizations (ADAPSO), which argued that being able to patent software innovations was vital to smaller companies being able to succeed in the market against larger companies, who would otherwise be able to imitate a product and bundle it as a free addition to their other offerings. [2]
ADR instigated litigation in Federal Court against IBM [8] with accusations that IBM was "retarding the growth of the independent software industry" [8] and "monopolizing the software industry", leading to IBM's famous unbundling of software and services in 1969. Legal actions against IBM also had the support of ADAPSO. [2]
In 1970, ADR and Programmatics, a wholly owned subsidiary of ADR, received an out-of-court settlement of $1.4 million from IBM. IBM also agreed to serve as a supplier of Autoflow, which meant another potential $600,000 in revenues for ADR. [9]
A popular ADR product was The Librarian, a version control system for IBM mainframe operating systems. In 1978, it was reported that The Librarian was in use at over 3,000 sites; [10] by a decade later that number had doubled. [11]
Roscoe (Remote OS Conversational Operating Environment, originally marketed as ROSCOE, was a software product for IBM Mainframes. [12] It is a text editor and also provides some operating system functionality such as the ability to submit batch jobs similar to ISPF [a] or XEDIT.
The ability to support 200+ concurrent active users and still have low overhead is based on a Single address space architecture. [14] [ dubious – discuss ]
The RPF (Roscoe Programming Facility) [15] [b] is a scripting language with string processing capability. [17]
ADR bought Massachusetts Computer Associates, also known as Compass, in the late 1960s. [18]
ADR later purchased the Datacom/DB database management system from Insyte Datacom and developed the companion product, IDEAL (Interactive Development Environment for an Application’s Life), a fourth-generation programming language.
ADR licensed DATACOM/DB to TCSC, a firm which sold modified versions of IBM's DOS/360 and DOS/VS operating systems, known as Edos. When, in 1980, Nixdorf Computer bought TCSC, Nixdorf sought to continue the licensing arrangement; ADR and NCSC went to court in a dispute over whether the licensing arrangement was terminated by the acquisition. [19] ADR and Nixdorf settled out of court in 1981, with an agreement that Nixdorf could continue to resell ADR's products. [20]
ADR was sold to Ameritech in 1986 and was kept intact as a subsidiary.
In 1988 Ameritech sold ADR to Computer Associates (CA). Computer Associates had a reputation for mass dismissals within companies it took over; this was the case with ADR as well, as some 200 employees from the Montgomery facility were let go on the morning of October 19, 1988. [21]
Computer Associates subsequently integrated the company into its Systems Products Division and new Information Products Division. [22] Roscoe was marketed as CA-Roscoe, [12] and The Librarian became known as CA Librarian. [23]
In computing, Interactive System Productivity Facility (ISPF) is a software product for many historic IBM mainframe operating systems and currently the z/OS and z/VM operating systems that run on IBM mainframes. It includes a screen editor, the user interface of which was emulated by some microcomputer editors sold commercially starting in the late 1980s, including SPF/PC.
Coherent is a clone of the Unix operating system for IBM PC compatibles and other microcomputers, developed and sold by the now-defunct Mark Williams Company (MWC). Historically, the operating system was a proprietary product, but it became open source in 2015, released under the BSD-3-Clause license.
The IBM 3790 Communications System was one of the first distributed computing platforms. The 3790 was developed by IBM's Data Processing Division (DPD) and announced in 1974. It preceded the IBM 8100, announced in 1979.
OfficeVision was an IBM proprietary office support application.
Pertec Computer Corporation (PCC), formerly Peripheral Equipment Corporation (PEC), was a computer company based in Chatsworth, California which originally designed and manufactured peripherals such as floppy drives, tape drives, instrumentation control and other hardware for computers.
Comprehensive Electronic Office (CEO) was a suite of office automation software from Data General introduced in 1981. It included word processing, email, spreadsheets, business graphics and desktop accessories. The software was developed mostly in PL/I on and for the AOS and AOS/VS operating systems.
Nixdorf Computer AG was a West German computer company founded by Heinz Nixdorf in 1952. Headquartered in Paderborn, Germany, it became the fourth largest computer company in Europe, and a worldwide specialist in banking and point-of-sale systems.
Datacom/DB is a relational database management system for mainframe computers. It was developed in the early 1970s by Computer Information Management Company and was subsequently owned by Insyte, Applied Data Research, Ameritech, and Computer Associates International, Inc. Datacom was acquired by CA Technologies, which renamed it to CA-Datacom/DB and later to CA Datacom/DB. In 2018, Broadcom acquired CA Technologies which included the CA Datacom product family. In 2021, Broadcom has dropped the CA and now refers to the product family as Datacom or Datacom/DB.
DUCS was a teleprocessing monitor from CFS Inc. It was one of two early local teleprocessing packages for IBM's DOS/VSE environment. DUCS provided an interface and access method for programmers to 'talk' to monitors. Such access methods later became known as APIs.
DOCS was a software package for IBM mainframes by CFS Inc., enabling access to the system console using 3270-compatible terminals.
Edos is a discontinued operating system based upon IBM's original mainframe DOS. The name stood for extended disk operating system. It was later purchased by the West German computer company Nixdorf, who renamed it to NIDOS.
Altos Computer Systems was founded in 1977 by David G. Jackson and Roger William Vass Sr. It focused on small multi-user computers, starting with multi-user derivatives of CP/M, and later including Unix and Xenix-based machines. In its 1982 initial public offering on NASDAQ, the company raised $59M. Thereafter the company's stock was traded under the symbol ALTO.
Martin A. Goetz was an American software engineer and pioneer in the development of the commercial software industry. He held the first software patent, and was product manager of Autoflow from Applied Data Research (ADR), which is generally cited as the first commercial software application.
Computer Associates Panvalet is a revision control and source code management system originally developed by Pansophic Systems for mainframe computers such as the IBM System z and IBM System/370 running the z/OS and z/VSE operating systems.
CP-6 is a discontinued computer operating system, developed by Honeywell, Inc. in 1976, which was a backward-compatible work-alike of the Xerox CP-V, fully rewritten for Honeywell Level/66 hardware. CP-6 was a command line oriented system. A terminal emulator allowed use of PCs as CP-6 terminals.
MainView, currently advertised as BMC MainView, is a systems management software produced by BMC Software. It was created in 1990 by Boole & Babbage and became part of BMC Software's services after they bought out Boole & Babbage in a stock swap.
Massachusetts Computer Associates, also known as COMPASS, was a software company founded by Thomas Edward Cheatham Jr. and based in Wakefield, Massachusetts from approximately 1961 to 1991, focusing primarily on programming language design and implementation, especially source-to-source transformation. It was acquired in the late 1960s by Applied Data Research.
Peter Pagé was a German software pioneer. He joined Software AG in Darmstadt in 1971 as one of 6 employees and in 1975 became Vice President of Software AG. Page developed NATURAL as the first fourth-generation programming language, which was instrumental in Software AG's success.
Shakuntala (Shaku) Atre is an Indian data scientist and an American business woman. After a fourteen-year career with IBM, she began her own firm and became widely regarded as an expert on business technology and database use. Atre is best known for her books Database: Structured Techniques for Design, Performance and Management: With Case Studies (1980), one of the first books written on managing databases, and her co-authored book Business Intelligence Roadmap, written with Larissa Moss. She has served as an adjunct professor of data science at University of Pune and at several institutions in the United States. Her works have been used as university textbooks.
The Librarian is a version control system and source code management software product originally developed by Applied Data Research for IBM mainframe computers. It was designed to supplant physical punched card decks as a way of maintaining programs, but kept a card model in terms of its interface. During the 1970s and 1980s it was in use at thousands of IBM mainframe installations and was one of the best-selling software products in the computer industry.
The Librarian from Applied Data Research, Inc, Panvalet from Pansophic Systems, Inc. and the Westinghouse Disk Utility from Westinghouse Electric Corp. continue to top the "systems" list with more than 3,000 sites to each of their credits.
The RPF (ROSCOE Programming Facility) shown ...[ permanent dead link ]
SR00-20-20