Applied Data Research was a large software vendor from the 1960s until the mid-1980s. ADR is often described as "the first independent software vendor". Founded in 1959, ADR was originally a contract development company. ADR eventually built a series of its own products. ADR's widely used major packages included: Autoflow for automatic flowcharting, [|Roscoe], MetaCOBOL, an extensible macro processor for the COBOL language, and Librarian for source-code management. ADR later purchased the Datacom/DBdatabase management system from Insyte Datacom and developed the companion product, IDEAL, a fourth-generation programming language. Another popular ADR product was The Librarian, a version control system for IBM mainframeoperating systems, now known as . In 1978, it was reported that The Librarian was in use at over 3,000 sites; by a decade later that number had doubled.
ADR instigated litigation in Federal Court against IBM with accusations that IBM was "retarding the growth of the independent software industry" and "monopolizing the software industry", leading to IBM's famous 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 meant another potential $600,000 in revenues for ADR.
Dispute with Nixdorf
ADR licensed DATACOM/DB to TCSC, a firm which sold modified versions of IBM's DOS/360 and DOS/VS operating systems, known as Edos. When, in 1980, Nixdorf Computer bought TCSC, Nixdorf sought to continue the licensing arrangement; ADR and NCSC went to court in a dispute over whether the licensing arrangement was terminated by the acquisition. ADR and Nixdorf settled out of court in 1981, with an agreement that Nixdorf could continue to resell ADR's products.
Corporate history
ADR bought Massachusetts Computer Associates, also known as Compass, in the late 1960s. 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.
