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Explains Susan Conti, a secretary who uses the software:
"It makes it easier to change wine lists because we can look up prices at a touch on the computer." Most of the software being sold today still goes into mainframe computers used by corporations or the Government. Banks, airlines and other major data processors last year purchased or leased $11.6 billion worth of programs, according to Input, a market-research firm in Mountain View, Calif.
Traditionally, mainframe software is leased, not sold, so the company that developed it can maintain control. The lease of a single program to keep track of banking transactions, for example, can cost as much as $200,000 a year.
But the real excitement in the industry is software for personal computers. While only $260 million worth was sold as recently as 1980, sales this year are expected to reach $1.5 billion. And by 1989 revenues could exceed $6 billion. At least 1,000 companies are making programs. Microsoft, located in Bellevue, Wash. (pop. 75,000), near Seattle, is the largest. In 1980 it sold $4 million worth of software; projected 1984 revenues are $100 million. William Gates, 28, Microsoft's chairman and cofounder, has amassed a personal fortune estimated at $100 million.
No one knows for sure how many programs actually exist; estimates range from 8,000 to 40,000. In fact, a mini-industry has grown up to keep track of the titles. Stewart Brand, the counterculture publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog, will come out with the Whole Earth Software Catalog this fall. Billboard magazine charts the progress of hot-selling software just the way it does that of Michael Jackson records.
Indeed, the software field has taken on many of the characteristics of the pop-music business. If a new product flops, manufacturers can quickly go from boom to bust. Programmers, the people who write software, can find themselves millionaires at 20 but has-beens at 30. So-called pirates are stealing millions of dollars' worth of programs by copying them illegally.
Manufacturers of popular software are becoming industry superstars. The heads of software companies, like Microsoft's Gates, Lotus Development's Mitchell Kapor and Software Publishing's Fred Gibbons are wooed by hardware companies, which want them to produce pro grams that will run on their machines. Says Gibbons: "Control of the personal-computer industry is shifting from the hardware manufacturers to the software suppliers."
Primitive forms of software first appeared 150 years ago. Charles Babbage, a mathematics professor at Cambridge University who also invented the speedometer and the locomotive cowcatcher, in 1834 designed a machine called the analytical engine to solve mathematical equations; it is generally considered the forerunner of today's computers. Augusta Ada, the Countess of Lovelace, daughter of the poet Lord Byron, helped finance the project. Credited with being the world's first programmer, she used punched cards to tell the machine what to