hätte ich mir gestern ja gerne gegeben ...

remember 1999/2000? the burst of the bubble? it was not the first one that hit computer industry. there was a time when software development hang on the umbilical cord of ibm, who prefered to change their spec on the fly, destroying software dreams, but there was also a software stock desaster dating back to 1969/70.

a major factor in the software stock debacle was the overvalued balance sheets then common in the industry - where all software development investment was classed as an asset under software inventory | datamation 1977

one company that survived and existed since 1964, was ard, applied data research, inc. holding the ¿first?/a patent on commercial software.

licence price back then: $4.800 and 6.000$ for a performance measurement system called "look". "librarian", "king of the line", was a sort of program management system priced between $4.900 and $10.000 in 1977.

a "king" back then had 3.500 installations. while others talked about 250 ..

in the 40s: george stibbitz told his bosses at bell labs:

for $50.000,- i could build a general purpose relay calculator. their response was, "who wants to spend $50.000,- just to do calculations." | july 1976, los alamos, industry pioneers gathering, datamation, sept 1976

peter rastl recalls:

Als ich Ende der siebziger Jahre gehört habe, es gibt so etwas wie E-Mail, war meine erste Reaktion: 'Was ist das für ein Blödsinn! Für so primitive Dinge wie Briefe schreiben verwendet man diese teuren Großrechenanlagen?' | rastl