Communications - October 2008

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.

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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.