Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
By the end of the decade, applications grew in size and complexity. It was ob-
vious that the LOC metric was no longer useful. In 1970, many IBM publication
groups exceeded their budgets due to basing document costs on a percentage of
coding costs. When Programming Language/Systems (PL/S) started to replace as-
sembly code, all of the document departments using a percentage of PL/S coding
costs exceeded their budgets. As a result, IBM began the studies that led to func-
tion point metrics a few years later.
Summary
At the start of the 1960s, software was bundled with computers and given away
with the hardware. The ENIAC patent made it difficult for other manufacturers
to build computers without heavy royalty payments. Eventually, legal case de-
cisions resulted in the unbundling of software and led to the commercial software
industry, putting computer architecture into the public domain. This decade also
witnessed thousands of businesses buying computers and starting to use them to
replace labor-intensive tasks such as record keeping. Software development organ-
izations and corporate data centers began to appear at the start of the decade and
expanded rapidly. Many new computer and software companies were created in
this decade, but few would have long lives.
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