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Martin Goetz, holder of the first US software patent, has died at 93.
Goetz was awarded a patent for data-sorting software in 1968, after a three-year fight with the US Patent Office over whether software could even be patented.
The New York Times writes that the company he co-founded, Applied Data Research, filed an antitrust suit IBM in 1969 over its bundled hardware and software. IBM agreed to unbundle, but ADR didn’t let up.
Applied Data Research nonetheless continued its lawsuit. It was settled in August 1970; the terms included an agreement to supply one of its programs, Autoflow, to IBM.
“He not only got what he wanted,” Ms. Jacobs said, “A.D.R. started selling more products and opened the doors to the independent software industry.”
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