| Fate | Acquired |
|---|---|
| Successor | Ameritech |
| Founded | 1959 |
| Founder(s) | Martin Goetz, Sherman Blumenthal, Ellwood Kauffman, Dave McFadden, Bernard Riskin, Robert Wickenden, and Stephen Wright |
| Defunct | 1986 |
| Headquarters | Princeton, New Jersey, United States |
| Services | independent contract programming |
Applied Data Research (ADR) was a large software vendor from the 1960s until the mid-1980s. ADR is often described as "the first independent software vendor".[1]
Founded in 1959, ADR was originally a contract development company. ADR eventually built a series of products. ADR's widely-used major packages included: Autoflow for automatic flowcharting, ROSCOE (Remote OS Conversational Operating Environment), and Librarian for source-code management. ADR later purchased the Datacom/DB database management system from Insyte Datacom and developed the companion product, IDEAL (Interactive Development Environment for an Application’s Life), a fourth-generation programming language.
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ADR received the first Patent issued for a computer program, a sorting system, on April 23, 1968.[2] The program was developed by Martin A. Goetz[3]
ADR instigated litigation in Federal Court against IBM [4] with accusations that IBM was "retarding the growth of the independent software industry" [4] and "monopolizing the software industry", leading to IBM's famous unbundling of software and services in 1969. In 1970, ADR and Programmatics, a wholly owned subsidiary of ADR, received an out-of-court settlement of $1.4 million from IBM. IBM also agreed to serve as a supplier of Autoflow, which could mean another $600,000 in revenues for ADR.[5]
ADR was sold to Ameritech in 1986 and was kept intact as a subsidiary. In 1988 Ameritech sold ADR to Computer Associates. Computer Associates integrated the company into its Systems Products Division and new Information Products Division.[6]