From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog by Martin Campbell-Kelly, MIT Press, £19.95/$29.95, ISBN 0262033038 Reviewed by Barry Fox
AS SCADS of IT industry employees lose their jobs, there is a bitter new joke in Silicon Valley. B2B does not stand for “Business to Business”, but “Back to Baltimore” or “Boom to Bust”. So although this book is, by Martin Campbell-Kelly’s own admission, out of date with a research cut-off of 1995, it is a timely reminder of earlier booms and busts. Heavy with dry fact, From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog is also a good read that saved my sanity as I waited in an airport lounge for a delayed plane.
In the 1950s, companies with an IBM computer had to pay a million dollars to a team of at least thirty to program it. The airlines were the first to exploit the command-and-control mainframe power unleashed in the 1960s by the FORTRAN and COBOL programming languages and the $8 billion spent by the US military on missile defence systems. American Airlines’ first system took three hours to process a reservation, however, and got 1 in 12 wrong.
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That gold-rush boom turned to bust around 1970, the year after IBM’s dominance attracted an anti-trust suit. Since then the industry has looked like a garden: plants thrive and wither for Darwinian reasons that are only obvious with hindsight.
In 1981, IBM damaged its own core business of mainframe computers by launching the PC, based on the microprocessors unveiled by Intel in 1971. The WordStar PC word-processing program cost $495, but companies had to pay as much every month to lease the comparable ATMS-III mainframe program from IBM. And by choosing Microsoft’s clunky MS-DOS operating system, instead of Gary Kildall’s CP/M, IBM made Bill Gates a billionaire and relegated Kildall’s Digital Research to the minor league. WordStar lost out to WordPerfect because the WordStar 2000 upgrade felt like a downgrade. Word and Excel then trounced WordPerfect and the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet because Microsoft’s programs had been developed for Windows, not IBM’s ill-fated OS/2 operating system.
Encylopaedia Britannica refused Microsoft’s offer of a CD-ROM deal, and tried to sell its own discs for $1000. Despite price cuts to $50, the company lost 200 years of reputation to Microsoft’s Encarta, which Campbell-Kelly dubs “a thoroughly lacklustre product”. It is a “gross distortion”, he insists, to think of Microsoft as the centre of the computer universe. But curiosity over Gates’s wealth has created an appetite for more books about Microsoft than about the rest of the industry put together.
It was the games market that once more made hardware more important than software. Gamers bought Nintendo consoles to play Mario, and Sega for Sonic.
This book is based on research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council of Great Britain. Clearly the grant came with no strings. There is a strong US focus because that is where most of the action took place. The British government’s past attempts to stimulate a local software industry are entertainingly ridiculed as a “triumph of hope over experience”.
