Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC)

Contribution to AI

Software in 1959 was something a manufacturer threw in with the hardware, written by its own staff or by the customer's; the notion that an outside firm might sell it as work-for-hire barely existed. Two SHARE veterans with a Honeywell contract and two hundred dollars between them tested that idea by building a business compiler for the H-800, and the language they produced borrowed from Ogden's Basic English in an attempt to make commercial programs readable by the accountants who depended on them. Several of its constructs — qualified data names, the group move of like-named items, a built-in sort, a report section specified by its appearance rather than its procedure — reappeared in COBOL, whose committee Roy Nutt sat on as Honeywell's representative. The larger consequence was structural. Once the computer manufacturers found they could buy systems software from a third party, compilers and operating systems stopped being an inseparable part of the machine, which is the precondition for an independent software industry and a decade ahead of IBM's decision to unbundle. Government work followed the same logic, from Jet Propulsion Laboratory flight operations to NASA's Huntsville computation laboratory in 1966. When the company reached the New York Stock Exchange in 1968, the first of its kind to do so, writing programs for other people had become a business the market could price.

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