On 2008-08-06 Mark Meyer, wrote: This book is scholarly, but accessible to the ordinary public, albeit people who are keenly interested in tables of rates of growth. The author describes the sources of his research humorously and in a most interesting manner. I give him very high marks for that, for letting the general public appreciate how hard it is to do research of this kind, sifting through all the junk for the few gems. I thought the author´s technical competence was excellent, too, and his insights into such subtleties as operating systems was great.
I have only two complaints. He too often says ´The story of ... is well documented elsewhere.´ A brief recap would have helped for those who don´t have time to read the other sources.
Second, there is exactly one picture in the book, and while it is great (a stack of 60,000 punch cards for the SAGE system), I wish there would have been a few more, especially of earlier systems.
But overall a fabulous book, very neatly wedged between business history and computer history!. And summed up by saying Very good historiography; could use more pictures. Currently From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry (History of Computing) has an overall rating of 8 over 10.
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The MIT Press claimed From its first glimmerings in the 1950s, the software industry has evolved to become the fourth largest industrial sector of the US economy. Starting with a handful of software contractors who produced specialized programs for the few existing machines, the industry grew to include producers of corporate software packages and then makers of mass-market products and recreational software. This book tells the story of each of these types of firm, focusing on the products they developed, the business models they followed, and the markets they served. By describing the breadth of this industry, Martin Campbell-Kelly corrects the popular misconception that one firm is at the center of the software universe. He also tells the story of lucrative software products such as IBM´s CICS and SAP´s R/3, which, though little known to the general public, lie at the heart of today´s information infrastructure. With its wealth of industry data and its thoughtful judgments, this book will become a starting point for all future investigations of this fundamental component of computer history.
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