Applied Data Research

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".

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.

First software patent

ADR received the first Patent issued for a computer program, a sorting system, on April 23, 1968. The program was developed by Martin A. Goetz

ADR IBM lawsuit

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 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.