ACM
Transactions on
Recon gurable
Technology and
Systems
This quarterly publication is a peer-reviewed and archival journal that
covers recon gurable technology,
systems, and applications on recon-
gurable computers. Topics include
all levels of recon gurable system
abstractions and all aspects of re-
con gurable technology including
platforms, programming environments and application successes.
www.acm.org/trets
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launch of IBM’s System/360 computer.
The 360 created, for the first time, a
standard computer platform, and it
massively expanded the computer population, particularly in medium-sized
businesses. Most of the new computer
owners did not have the resources to
hire a staff of programmers or to buy
the services of a software contractor.
There was thus an applications vacuum filled by the first software product
firms. These firms wrote programs for
specific industries (such as the insurance or construction industries), or for
generic, cross-industry functions (such
as payroll or stock control). The sales of
individual software products were quite
modest: if a product had 100 or so customers it was considered quite successful. Software product prices were high,
typically $50,000 upward. This was not
only because of the low sales volume,
but because software writing was very
capital intensive. The only way to run a
software business was to hire a team of
programmers plus a mainframe computer and put them to work. This cost
at least $1 million a year (closer to $10
million in today’s currency).
The first software products were
usually supplied in both source code
and object code. This was necessary
because customizing software was a
little-understood technology and most
users configured their application software by modifying the source and recompiling it. Software-product companies were, naturally, concerned about
disclosing source code, because if it
fell into the hands of a competitor it
would make it easy for them to produce
a competing product. In a somewhat
uneasy compromise, paying customers
received a copy of the source code but
were bound by the license terms with
a trade secrecy clause requiring them
not to disclose the source code or documentation to third parties.
The advent of personal computers,
which occurred during the late 1970s,
gave rise to a new software industry that
rewrote the rules for making and selling
software. The cost of computer power
plummeted, the computer population
soared, and the number of software
firms increased exponentially. However,
although the hardware-cost barrier to
software making had been lowered, code
development still needed a disciplined
environment of salaried programmers
who worked office hours in the same
physical location. Although computer
networks existed in the 1980s, they were
slow and impractical—software development remained a same-time, same-place, collaborative activity. PC software
products were comparatively inexpensive (usually less than $500), but this was
only because the sales volume was high
compared with mainframe software.
Software writing remained an expensive,
highly capitalized activity.
In the new PC environment, with
thousands of software companies and
millions of users, it was no longer feasible for software companies to supply
their source code to users, or their products would be rapidly duplicated. Firms
such as Microsoft, Lotus, and WordPer-fect had invested hundreds of millions
of dollars in software development; disclosing their software would have been
akin to giving away the family jewels. Of
course, software had some legal protection through copyright laws, but this did
not protect the data structures and algorithms that would have been exposed
by access to the source code. By the
mid-1980s source code disclosure had
almost completely ceased—in 1983,
IBM was one of the last major companies to stop disclosing source code in its
so-called OCO (object-code only) policy.
Competitors and users alike objected to
the OCO policy, but IBM was resolute
and was doing no more or less than the
rest of the industry. By the mid-1980s,
trade secrecy was endemic in the software products industry.
The ascendancy of the Internet in the
early 1990s began another radical transformation of software development.
Inexpensive network access removed
the idea of open
source software
goes back to the very
dawn of computing,
when the mainframe
computer was getting
established.