On 10/3/2013 12:23 PM, Jerry Whitteridge wrote:
We need to remember that the CBT tape products WERE the first "Shareware" and used in production in many shops. Then the bean counters started worrying about support and got us used to support from "Vendors" rather than reading the dumps ourselves and fixing the code we had (OCO any one ?).
Arnie Casinghino's CBT was not the first shareware. The U.S. government made free software(1) available for the 7xx/79xx mainframes long before the S/360 was designed; additionally programs for the 1401 and 1410 were floating around. Even limiting the discussion to the 360s, IBM had a distribution system for type III (IBM employee contributed software) and type IV (non-IBM contributions).
(1) I still have the manual for BOUMAC, a package for vector and matrix calculation, from the Boulder, CO office of the National Bureau of Standards (the N.I.S.T. precursor).
Gerhard Postpischil Bradford, Vermont ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
