The beginning of the 1980s witnessed a world-changing event: the release of the IBM personal computer in 1981. The marketing power of IBM and the ease of use of the IBM PC opened up the markets for commercial software because almost every citizen would soon use a computer for personal tasks.
The IBM PC catapulted Microsoft to become a major player in the software industry, and Bill Gates became the world’s wealthiest man for many years. The famous disk operating system, or Microsoft DOS (MS-DOS), had been ordered by IBM in 1981, and the first version was released to outside customers in 1982. DOS was the main operating system of the early PC era.
The Windows operating system was originally an extension to DOS, but by the time of Windows 2 in 1982, it began to have a graphical appearance with overlapping screen images.
Early in the decade, Apple selected the Objective-C programming language as its main language for Apple products. The language was originally developed by Dr. Tom Love and Dr. Brad Cox at ITT, and it was acquired by Stepstone Corporation when ITT sold its telecommunications business to Alcatel. Objective-C is still used in Apple products, making it one of the longest-lasting industrial
programming languages.
This decade saw the incorporation of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) in 1984 and increasing rigor of software development. Software assessments as designed by Watts Humphrey were offered by SEI, and assessments plus benchmarks were offered by Software Productivity Research (SPR), starting a year before SEI. Both methods expanded rapidly in this decade.
Programming languages began to explode in numbers and variety with new languages such as Ada, Quick Basic, Pascal, C11, Objective-C, and dozens of others appearing. New languages came out at a rate of more than two per month during this decade.
This decade witnessed the arrival of the internet and what would later facilitate the World Wide Web. The internet is a collection of protocols that connects computers and networks to each other. The term “world wide web” was coined by Tim Berners-Lee and is a set of services that use the internet. It would be the next decade before the World Wide Web actually became global.
The internet derived from the older ARPANET and several other similar networks in Europe. Other enabling technologies were needed; among them was the famous internet protocol suite TCP/IP. The TCP/IP standard facilitated the emergence of a new commercial business of “internet service providers,” or ISPs as they are commonly called. (Other enabling inventions such as hyper-text markup language [HTML] are discussed in the next chapter dealing with the 1990s.)
The International Function Point Users’ Group (IFPUG) moved from Canada to the United States in 1986. Soon after, the IFPUG began to offer certification examinations to ensure accuracy in function point counts.
The initial examination was developed by Al Albrecht, who was at SPR at the time, having retired from IBM. In later decades, the IFPUG would become the world’s largest software metrics organization with branches in more than 25 countries.
Function point metrics began to replace older metrics such as “lines of code” and “cost per defect” for economic studies. The lines of code (LOC) metric ignores requirements and design and penalizes high-level languages. The cost per defect metric ignores fixed costs and penalizes quality. Function points are the most accurate metrics for software economic analysis.
The SPQR/20 estimation tool in 1984 was the first commercial estimation tool built around function point metrics. It was also the first estimating tool with integrated sizing. It produced sizes of source code volumes for 30 languages and sizes of various paper documents such as requirements, design, and user manuals.
This decade witnessed the rise (and fall) of numerous computer- and software-related companies. Some of these achieved bursts of glory but eventually succumbed to technical malaise. Some of the names of companies that thrived during this decade include Amdahl, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), Burroughs, Control Data Corporation (CDC), Wang (a pioneer in word processing), Data General, Tandem, the RCA computer line, the Honeywell computer line, the Bull computer line, the Xerox computer line, the AT&T personal computer line, the ITT personal computer line (not fully IBM-compatible), and quite a few others. Some companies that grew rapidly in this era still prosper, such as Hewlett-Packard. Others such as Sun were acquired, in this case by Oracle.
The rise and fall of companies in the computing and software industries is an interesting story. Some of the issues that caused business failures included the rise of IBM, attempts to lock clients into
proprietary hardware and software, and a widespread failure to recognize the importance of personal computers as a world-changing event in business operations. For example, DEC was late in bringing out a personal computer, and when it did, its computers were not fully compatible with IBM’s, which by then was on its way to being the main tool of millions of corporate personnel.
Although the fundamental technology was designed in the previous decade, Sony and Philips combined to bring out the very successful “compact disk read-only memory” (CD-ROM) in 1983. The first music recorded on a CD was Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony in 1981. On March 2, 1983, CD players and several disks were released in the United States, which started a boom.
These disks were soon applied to personal computers, although briefly competing devices such as the Bernouli Box and the Iomega Zip Disk competed but were soon bypassed by CDs that could be written on as well as read from. The huge storage capacities of these CDs allowed whole software packages such as Microsoft Office to be delivered on a single disk, as opposed to dozens of floppy disks.
In the next decade, the even higher-capacity “digital versatile disks” (DVDs) would become popular for both movies and very high-capacity computer storage devices.
Although not a pure software organization, the famous Project Management Institute (PMI) was founded in 1984. It has become well known for its certification programs in various management disciplines. It has also created a large library of books and papers called the PMI “body of knowledge,” or PMBOK.