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This podcast about the history of zaibatsu, hardware, and software comes to mind. https://www.disruptingjapan.com/the-forgotten-mistake-that-killed-japans-softw
by hoherd 2mo ago
This podcast about the history of zaibatsu, hardware, and software comes to mind. https://www.disruptingjapan.com/the-forgotten-mistake-that-killed-japans-software-industry https://www.disruptingjapan.com/the-forgotten-mistake-that-k...
> Software was not viewed so much as a product, but more like a service, similar to integration, training, and ongoing support and maintenance. It was usually sold on a time-and-materials basis, and sometimes it was just thrown in for free to sweeten the deal. The real money was in the hardware.
> Software development was considered rather low-skill work. It didn’t pay well and was viewed as a kind of clerical work. The job was simply to write software that was close enough to whatever sales had promised the client while they were out drinking last week.
- tdeck 2mo agoThis sounds like the way software was viewed through at least the 1960s in the US.
- vincent-manis 2mo agoUntil the threat of anti-trust against IBM, and the latter's decision to “unbundle” its software from its hardware, in 1969. There had been proprietary software before that, but very little horizontal software (OSs, development tools, etc.) Autoflow's flowchart generator was a rare example of this.