Re: SXMACLIB

On 9/28/2019 10:43 PM, [email protected] [H390-MVS] wrote:
> As well as I know it, though I wasn't following it much at the time, there
> was a long time when software wasn't considered copyrightable.
> 
> We are so used to it being copyrightable now, that it is hard to
> imagine it ever being different.
> 
> I suspect partly it was that, at the time, each company's software
> only ran on their computers, so it didn't matter much.
Not quite - I worked for the guilty party in the sixties. IBM did not 
charge for software, including 	CRBE and CRJE. Our Vice President Marty 
Goetz, a co-founder of Applied Data Research, didn't like free 
competition to ROSCOE (really awful in its early version - you had to 
zap and lose 2740 support to get 2741s running), so he sued and won, 
thus "forcing" IBM to start charging for most system add-ons. He also 
managed to get a software patent on a SORT, justifying that the software 
controlled a hardware process.

Gerhard Postpischil
Bradford, VT

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