Applied Data Research (ADR)

Contribution to AI

Software had no price before Autoflow because it had no separate existence: manufacturers shipped programmes with the machines, and anyone who wrote a useful utility gave it away or kept it in-house. ADR's flowcharting programme, offered directly to RCA 501 owners in 1964 after RCA declined to buy it outright and ported to the far larger IBM 1401 market in 1965, is generally reckoned the first programme marketed to customers as a product in its own right — and it was licensed rather than sold, the arrangement under which almost all commercial software has changed hands since. Establishing that the product existed was only half the work. Goetz filed a patent application in 1965 covering a sorting method and received it in April 1968, the first US patent granted on software; Computerworld put it on the front page under a headline conceding that nobody yet knew what it implied, and the question it opened — whether a procedure can be owned — has occupied the courts ever since. ADR then complained to the Justice Department and sued IBM in 1969 over the free Flowcharter bundled with its hardware, settling out of court in August 1970 for two million dollars, by which time IBM had begun separating software prices from machine prices. Every firm that now sells a model, a compiler or an application without also building the computer trades in a market ADR argued into being.

Drafted with AI and edited by hand (claude-opus-5, reviewed 2026-08).