History

Software Memories - Historical articles about the enterprise software industry, its companies, and its pioneers.
http://www.softwarememories.com/

The Seven Ages of Information Retrieval - Essay on the history of information retrieval and search technologies, written before the World Wide Web took off.
http://www.ifla.org/VI/5/op/udtop5/udtop5.htm

CORBA history - Critical history of the CORBA standard for object request brokers.
http://acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=396&page=1

Tincat Group, Inc.— MultiValue Family Tree - Family tree "poster" and timeline for multivalue (PICK and U2) database management product lines.
http://www.tincat-group.com/mv/familytree.html

System R History - Includes oral history transcripts about System R and SQL. From 1995.
http://www.mcjones.org/System_R/

Stottler Henke - Artificial Intelligence History - Brief history of artificial intelligence, especially expert systems
http://www.stottlerhenke.com/ai_general/history.htm

IBM DB2's 25th Anniversary: Birth Of An Accidental Empire - Information Week article on relational DBMS history. Discusses IBM internal politics, and the cooperation between IBM and UC Berkeley researchers.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/database_apps/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=208403005

PowerBuilder History - Idiosyncratic history of PowerBuilder and other client/server development tools.
http://pbdj.sys-con.com/node/124571

PostgreSQL History Document - Capsule history of POSTGRES-related database management systems.
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-advocacy/2004-12/msg00033.php

Borud - History of search engine vendor FAST Search & Transfer, and of a predecessor company founded by an early technical employee.
http://blog.borud.no/2008_01_01_archive.html

The Vintage Mac Museum - Screenshots of vintage Macintosh software.
http://www.d4.dion.ne.jp/~motohiko/

Dan Bricklin's History Section - By Dan Bricklin, co-inventor of Visicalc
http://www.bricklin.com/history/intro.htm

Cincom Timeline - Official timeline-history of database pioneer Cincom.
http://cincom.com/us/eng/cincom/about-cincom/history-culture/industry-first/index.jsp

The Technology and Business of ObjectStore - Detailed two-part history of Object Design, maker of object-oriented database management system ObjectStore.
http://danweinreb.org/blog/the-technology-and-business-of-objectstore

Information Technology Corporate Histories Collection - History of various IT companies, especially enterprise software vendors. Affiliated with the Computer History Museum.
http://www.computerhistory.org/corphist/index.php

Drupal Nation: Software to Power the Left - Open-source content management system Drupal's roots in the 2004 Howard Dean Presidential campaign. Based on a Master's thesis.
http://www.digidave.org/adventures_in_freelancing/2008/12/drupal-nation-software-to-power-the-left.html

Beer and Nappies -- A Data Mining Urban Legend - Article debunking the beer-and-diapers data mining urban legend.
http://web.onetel.net.uk/%7Ehibou/Beer%20and%20Nappies.html

Outliners & Programming - Dave Winer on the history of some early personal computer software products.
http://davewiner.userland.com/outlinersProgramming

Lannigan.org - Site with history of several software companies (InSystems, Powersoft, Covalent).
http://www.lannigan.org/insystems.htm

Xconomy: The Greatest Internet Pioneers You Never Heard Of - Article about the history of Erwise, a Finnish project that anticipated the Mosaic browser.
http://www.xconomy.com/national/2009/03/03/the-greatest-internet-pioneers-you-never-heard-of-the-story-of-erwise-and-four-finns-who-showed-the-way-to-the-web-browser/

Usenet Software: History and Sources - Short essay on the development of Usenet architecture.
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/usenet/software/part1/

Teradata History - Official summary company history of Teradata.
http://www.teradata.com/t/history/

The History of Software Patents - A history of how software went from unpatentable to patentable.
http://www.bitlaw.com/software-patent/history.html

Powersoft History - Capsule history of PowerBuilder, with a scan of a product advertisement.
http://www.lannigan.org/powersoft_powerbuilder_history.htm

Distributed 'Stars' coming out - 1989 Software Magazine article giving dates for the introduction of distributed database management systems products from IBM, Ingres, Tandem, and others.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0SMG/is_n5_v9/ai_7242478

The Hard Work of Software History - Paper on the challenges and techniques of preserving software history, by a Stanford University curator. [PDF]
http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlpubs/rbm/backissuesvol2no/lowood.PDF

Visicorp 1978-84 - A business school case study detailing the history of electronic spreadsheet pioneer Visicorp. [PDF]
http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/dick.rumelt/Docs/Cases/Visicorp.pdf

DataDirect History - Official company history of the ODBC/JDBC/data connectivity pioneer variously known as Pioneer Software, Q+E Software, and DataDirect.
http://www.datadirect.com/company/history/index.ssp

The Origins of Today's OLAP Products - History of analytic software products, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, which the author regards as precursors to modern OLAP.
http://www.olapreport.com/origins.htm

History of Computing: Software Index - Taxonomy of many kinds of software, with historical perspective.
http://www.thocp.net/software/software.htm