Software Patents in Business History

Reading the 2002 edited volume, From 0 to 1: An Authoritative History of Modern Computing, I came across an interesting history of the first software patent—a business history, as opposed to a legal history. I hadn't seen this anywhere before, so I'll recount it here.

Luanne Johnson, president (now co-chair) of the Software History Center, tells the story of Martin A. Goetz at Applied Data Research (ADR), a Princeton, New Jersey company founded in 1959 to sell computer programming services.

In...