Martin Campbell-Kelly

The History of the Internet: The Missing Narratives

The origins of the Internet are only partially understood. It is often believed that the Internet grew as a tree from a tiny acorn, the ARPANET network set up in 1969. In this study, we argue that this interpretation is incomplete at best and seriously flawed at worst. Our article makes three contributions. First, on the basis of a wide variety of primary and secondary sources we reconstruct the history of computer networks between the late 1950s and the early 1990s. We show that the ARPANET network was one among a myriad of (commercial and non-commercial) networks that developed over that period of time – the integration of these networks into an internet was likely to happen, whether ARPANET existed or not. Second, we make a systematic effort to quantify the significance of these various networks. This allows us to visualize more clearly the extent to which the ARPANET network was one among many, and not a particularly large one at that. Third, we provide a nuanced interpretation of the rise of various technologies, including the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol and the World Wide Web, as ‘dominant designs.’ Their rise should be interpreted within the economic framework of industries with network effects, in which historical accidents bring about tipping points that lead to universal acceptance. We thus show that history matters for understanding why information systems function in the way they do.

Pragmatism, not ideology: Historical perspectives on IBM’s adoption of open-source software

We track IBMs approach to software production and commercialization between 1950 and the present. We find that in the 1950s IBM followed what today would be called an open-source model - its software source code was open, free of charge, and written collaboratively with its users. By the mid 1980s, all of these attributes had been reversed - IBMs software was closed source, sold or leased independently of hardware sales, and written without the collaboration of its users. More recently, the company has been in a state of transition, achieving a balance between free, open-source software and proprietary software that still generates 20% of its revenues. We interpret these radical swings in light of the substantial changes that have taken place since the 1950s in the costs and benefits of open source, bundled, and collaborative software vis-a-vis the alternatives.

Number Crunching without Programming: The Evolution of Spreadsheet Usability

The first personal-computer spreadsheet, VisiCalc, was launched in May 1979. During the next decade, the spreadsheet evolved from a simple calculating aid to an indispensable tool of modern business, employed by tens of millions of users who had little or no direct computer experience. This article describes the development of spreadsheet usability from VisiCalc through Lotus 1-2-3 to Microsoft Excel.

The Airy tape: an early chapter in the history of debugging

The discovery of a paper-tape relic consisting of an undebugged program written for the EDSAC computer in 1949 is described. It is believed that this program is the first real, nontrivial application ever written for a stored-program computer. An examination of the program sheds new light on the extent to which the debugging problem was unanticipated by early computer programmers, and the motivation for the development at Cambridge of systematic programming practices and debugging aids. The impact of these early developments on programming elsewhere is discussed.<<ETX>>

The History of the History of Software

Just as the fields of software and hardware development have evolved, the field of software history has likewise matured. At first, the history of software was exclusively focused on technology. Later, there were historical explorations of the software industry and professions. Today the emphasis is on applications and the societal changes resulting from software.

The Evolution of Network Industries: Lessons from the Conquest of the Online Frontier, 1979–95

In this paper we dissect the competitive dynamics of a network industry that has not been systematically studied in the past—the consumer‐oriented online networks of the pre‐1995 era. After briefly reconstructing the historical evolution of the industry we focus on a number of issues at the intersection of theory and data: the importance of direct and indirect network effects, tipping to a dominant player and the entry strategies adopted by two different waves of entrants. We also analyse price wars and the displacement of the leader in the first half of the 1990s. In the final section we focus on some remaining puzzles that suggest directions for further theoretical and empirical research.

Economic Perspectives on the History of the Computer Time-Sharing Industry, 1965-1985

The history of the computer time-sharing industry is one of the unwritten chapters in the overall history of computing. In this article, we show that the time-sharing industry constituted a major sector of the computer services industry until the early 1980s, when time-sharing was made obsolescent by the personal computer.

The RDBMS Industry: A Northern California Perspective

This article describes the origins and development of the relational database management systems (RDBMS) industry, focusing on the firms IBM, Oracle, Ingres, Informix, and Sybase in the 1980s. The author analyzes the industrys evolution in terms of the disruptive technology paradigm and regional economics and then broadly outlines the industrys later development.

In praise of 'Wilkes, Wheeler, and Gill'

Reflections on the first textbook on programming.

Information Technology and Establishment Size in America: Rybczynski Redivivus☆

Abstract The Rybczynski Theorem is one of the staples of international trade theory. In their article in this issue of the journal, J.J. Rosa and J. Hanoteau apply the theorem to a two-by-two world in which the two “industries” are small firms and large firms, and the two inputs are information and all other. The assumption that small firms are more information intensive, coupled with the fact that information has become pervasive in recent decades, allows them to derive the prediction that small firms will account for increasingly larger proportions of total output and employment in the economy. We highlight a couple of issues that we find problematic in the Rosa–Hanoteau study, and then develop two different empirical strategies to probe the connections between IT and the size distribution of establishments. First, we combine County Business Patterns with input–output data to explore whether the share of small plants has grown at a faster pace among industries that demand IT more heavily. Second, we explore, on an industry-by-industry basis and taking into account the potential endogeneity of IT location, whether clustering of IT firms in specific US counties is associated with a relatively large share of small establishments, on average, in those counties.