[9nGQluzmnq3M]

For me the most interesting part of the article is how virtually all the influential companies being quoted have disappeared. America Online, Architex (who?), Computer Associates (haven't heard that one in a while), DEC, HP (still around but a shadow of its former self), Iconovex (?), Illustra (?), Informix (acquired by IBM), Macromedia (eaten by Adobe), Metrowerks (?), SCO, SGI, Sybase, ...

[kls]

Sad part is I remember them all, it was the best of times it was the worst of times. Be thankful you don't know who Computer Associates is. They are the grim reaper of software. Their model is buy aging software and milk the licences to death before the software is completely dead. Think Oracle with no initial innovation that distinguished them from any other IT mega-corp back then.

Metroworks built dev tooling and IDE's the where big on Mac's back in the day and they where awesome for their time.

[rwmurrayVT]

Computer Associates is pretty much the bottom of the barrel. They changed their name at some point to CA Technologies and ended up being acquired by Broadcom sometime around the end of 2018/2019.

Another fun fact is that they had a huge accounting scandal around the dotcom crash involving a 35 day month! They ended up settling for around 300kk USD.

Edit: They settled for 225kk USD. Sanjay got 12 years in prison and an 8kk USD fine.