When you think of Software

Question

What other company comes to your mind, besides Microsoft? May be top 5 companies?

Sam Hobbs · Answer

Absolutely IBM develops software. They are among the very few early developers of operating systems. They wrote the OSs for the hardware they developed, and they have been making business machines for more than a century. They did not develop operating systems until about 1960, depending on what you call an OS. They wrote the MFT, MVS and DOS operating systems in the 1960s; of course that DOS is totally different from PC DOS. They wrote the COBOL compilers I used for many years of my career, and compilers for many other languages. They wrote PROFS, which I think meant Professional Office. I used it at Lockheed in the 1980s. It had an email system that worked quite well. They designed PL/1 and developed operating systems with it. They of course wrote Fortran compilers. The APL programming language was developed with IBM, which is a very powerful scientific language. The Rexx programming language was developed with the interaction of many IBM employees using email to collaborate. That is nothing new now, but it was very new back then. They developed telecommunications software; just that much is huge. They designed and developed OS/2 years before Windows NT. Their software supported dynamic linking before most other software; before DOS existed and long before Windows. Their IMS was a highly used database and interactive system that I used at Lockheed in the 1980s. IBM was a pioneer in the field of distributed databases. Relational databases were invented by Edgar Codd as an employee of IBM and IBM developed DB2 to implement the theory. IBM's CICS is an interactive system that is still being used now that is similar in function to what the internet does now. IMS also functioned similar to what the internet does. IBM develops artificial intelligence. About a year ago their AI computer system called Watson was able to compete with two experts in the television game show Jeopardy. In that game, the questions are actually answers but let's say the game consists of questions and answers. The questions are about a very wide subject area. Watson was able to read the question like a person, understand it and look up the answer and it did quite well compared to the people. Oh, and they were an early developer of office software, especially word processing. You just don't know how much IBM's word processing software has affected what HTML is. I know; I worked with something that is the earliest version of what HTML is now. IBM created a Final Form Text (FFT) format and a Revisable Form Text (RFT) format for word processing documents and I wonder if it is not coincidental that the acronym RFT is so similar to RTF. IBM had much more impact on Microsoft than most people realize. IBM's GDDM was an early version of graphics software and you would probably be surprised how similar it is to GDI. IBM develops software. HP develops software too. It is so funny that you thing Microsoft is a big developer of software but IBM is not.

Mahesh Chand · Answer

Let me rephrase the question. I guess I meant to ask about programming/software. I am not sure HP, IBM, Infosys and Dell qualifies for it. Borland, Sun, Microsoft ..

Sam Hobbs · Answer

IBM is probably on top or at most second to Microsoft. Computer Associates sells a lot of software but they do not develop it and they often do a bad job of maintaining software but they charge a lot. Doesn't Google develop a lot of software? Apple develops software. I forget what other software companies there are but we all know there are many more. We can of course look up the information but the question is what comes to my mind.

Senthilkumar · Answer

Mirosoft Oracle (Sun Mircro systems included now) SAP AT&T IBM DELL HP Infosys