Charles B. Wang, Chairman of Computer Associates International, To Keynote Software History Conference At Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, September 22-23, 2000.

Business Editors & Technology Writers

PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 20, 2000

An event to commemorate the significant accomplishments of the early software industry participants sponsored by the Charles Babbage Institute will be held at Xerox PARC on September 22nd and 23rd, 2000. The conference will mark the pivotal events of the 1960s that inaugurated the software products and software industry. These products and events are a defining point in today's information technology industry. The introduction of software products for the first time in the late 1950s is as significant an event as the introduction of the ENIAC in the mid 1940s. The dynamic launched by the emerging software industry is hardly measurable in its sweep in society. Software literally changed all our lives.

The conference will be launched with a keynote address by Charles B. Wang, Chairman and CEO of Computer Associates International on Friday evening at 6:00 pm, when he will speak about the history of Computer Associates and some of the events that made it the company it is today. A reception follows. Saturday's program will contain three sessions devoted to (1) the launching of new products in an era of bundled computer systems, (2) the decision to unbundle, and (3) the emergence and growth of a new industry. Company founders, early product developers, and historians will offer retrospective comments about the history of watershed events in the liberation of software.

The Charles Babbage Institute (CBI), named for the 19th century computing pioneer Charles Babbage, is an internationally-known research and archival center for the history of information processing, located at the University of Minnesota. CBI is hosting this conference "Unbundling History: The Emergence of the Software Product" around the creation of the world software industry. Arthur L. Norberg, Director of CBI, said that this conference is historic in two senses, first, "it is the first time such a retrospective of the accomplishments of industry founders has been held," and second, "the conference will result in a new view of one of the three defining events in the history of computing." The events he referred to are the advent of electronic digital computing, software as a product, and the introduction of the world wide web.

The conference will be held at the Xerox PARC auditorium, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA, on September 22 and 23, 2000. Headliners, besides Charles Wang, include Martin Goetz, of ADR, Duane Whitlow, Syncsort, Watts Humphrey, formerly of IBM now with Carnegie-Mellon University, Peter Cunningham, President and CEO of INPUT, Walter Bauer, founder of Informatics, and Larry Welke, President of Info Partners International.

Major issues to be addressed at the conference include:

-- What factors encouraged companies to introduce software products in a
bundled environment.

-- Critical problems encountered in developing software packages.

-- Development costs and financing, and the marketing of intangible goods.

-- The decision to unbundled software from hardware. And

-- The wave of specialized companies that entered the marketplace following
unbundling.

The organizing committee for this conference consisted of Arthur Norberg, Luanne Johnson of the Software History Center, and Martin Campbell-Kelly of the University of Warwick (U.K.).

Further information can be obtained from the Institute by calling Arthur Norberg at [phone] and viewing the CBI web site http://cbi.umn.edu for conference details.