From the Editor’s Desk

When I give lectures on the history of the software industry for my informatics and computer science students, I often ask them before I begin if they know which are the top ten largest software companies in the world. Rarely can they name more than one or two (typically Microsoft and Oracle), and even after I reveal to them the full list they often do not recognize most of the companies or have any idea what kinds of products they develop. This is in part because even aspiring software developers underestimate the degree to which most software is either custom-developed or marketed to organizations rather than individuals. And generally speaking, they do not even imagine that some of these firms might have originated outside of the United States. This popular bias towards consumer-oriented and American firms is too often shared in the historical literature as well.

In his article on “Path Creation in the Software Industry—The Case of Software AG,” Timo Leimbach tells the story of how a West German-based firm managed not only to dominate its home markets but also successfully enter the highly competitive American market for database software. From its founding in the late 1960s through the early 1990s, Software AG was the largest software company in Germany, far surpassing its nearest competitor SAP (one of the oft-overlooked members of my contemporary top ten list, and a company about which Leimbach has also written extensively about¹). Drawing on the concept of “path creation,” a more active and agent-focused version of the economic concept of path dependency, Leimbach shows how the leaders of Software AG worked to establish their ADABAS database system as an international standard in the emerging database industry. It was only when the company failed to adapt to a changing technological and economic environment—most particularly the rise of the relational database and the “vertical disintegration” of the computer industry that came with personal computing and computer networking—that Software AG lost its leadership both at home and internationally.

In a second article on the software industry in Germany, Corinna Schlombs in “The ‘IBM Family’: American Welfare Capitalism, Labor, and Gender in Postwar Germany,” explores the strategies that IBM chair and CEO Thomas Watson pursued during the post-war expansion of IBM’s international operations. Schlombs shows how in Germany in particular, Watson’s strategy of emphasizing the “family” culture of his company helped overcome resistance from German labor unions. The paternalistic vision of Watson as a benevolent father-figure to his employees, which Schlombs argues was enabled by both Watson’s own charisma and the influence both in public and private of his wife Jeanette, allowed IBM to import its distinctive (and distinctively American) style of corporate welfare into a potentially hostile German labor environment. The highly-gendered image of the family that Watson and his wife represented appealed to a socially conservative and largely Catholic workforce. This in turn allowed IBM to resist the influence of the otherwise powerful German labor unions.

In her article “Imagining the Personal Computer: Conceptualizations of the Homebrew Computer Club 1975–1977,” Elizabeth Petrick delves deep into the archives of the celebrated Menlo Park Homebrew Computer club. The result is a nuanced and insightful portrait of a group remarkably self-aware of their own potential role in history, and conflicted about the tension between community and commercialism. On the one hand, the Homebrewers valued openness and sharing; on the other, many were entrepreneurs who saw enormous financial opportunity in the emerging microcomputer industry. Petrick explores this tension as it played out in the debate over software prompted by Bill Gate’s famous 1976 “Open Letter to Hobbyists,” which decried, among other things, the “theft” of software encouraged by the Homebrew community. In her close analysis of the Homebrew newsletters, Petrick reveals that attitudes within this community were much more complicated than is typically portrayed, with some members supporting Gate’s approach to the commercialization of the personal computer software industry. But while Homebrew Computer Club members may have differed in their attitudes towards intellectual property, they shared an enthusiasm for expanding...