
Charles B. Wang, co-founder of Computer Associates, has died - Element_
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/22/obituaries/charles-b-wang-dead.html
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larrysalibra
10+ years ago, I had the opportunity to pitch to Charles and his wife.

His advice to us was stop trying to raise money and “Just fucking do it.”

If you’ve never read the history of the company he founded, Computer
Associates, it’s an interesting story of growth by M&A - at one time it was
the largest software company in the world, ahead of Microsoft.
[http://www.company-histories.com/Computer-Associates-
Interna...](http://www.company-histories.com/Computer-Associates-
International-Inc-Company-History.html)

RIP Charles.

~~~
shoo
Interesting link!

> After an initial failure, he succeeded with CA-SORT, a program enabling
> computers to sort through data quickly and economically. Wang's SORT offered
> competition to a similar IBM program, and Wang convinced many businesses
> with IBM hardware to change over to CA's product. Mainframe software was
> licensed rather than sold, and the recurring revenue from the licenses of
> the SORT software was a great boost to Computer Associates.

~~~
le-mark
Interesting to note that legacy mainframe sorting isn't just moving values
around in memory like all the algorithms we mostly study today. Mainframes
back then had vanishingly small amounts of RAM (compared to what we have
today) and had to use tape and later disk (dasd) for any real storage. So this
type of sort is known as disk or tape sort. One "nicety" was that most records
on tape (and subsequently disk) were "fixed" length, so could count on
advancing x number of bytes reliably for next/prev record etc.

It was a different era for sure.

------
GrumpyNl
Sold my first spreadsheet with macros build in SuperCalc 1 to the dutch
government. What a time.

~~~
java-man
Do you know if they are still using it?

