

Interview with SAP Co-Founder Hasso Plattner - NonEUCitizen
http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,824223,00.html

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bootload
_"... it was exactly 40 years ago that you and four partners founded SAP.
Today the market leader for business software is worth some $85 billion (€64
billion) on the stock market. Why is SAP the only German IT company that's a
major global player? ..."_

Older than Microsoft & still going. I enjoyed reading about the early days of
SAP, _"SAP: Inside the Secret Software Power"_ by Gerd Meissner ~
[http://www.amazon.com/SAP-Inside-Secret-Software-
Power/dp/00...](http://www.amazon.com/SAP-Inside-Secret-Software-
Power/dp/0071347852/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1333014700&sr=1-5) The bit
that surprised me was the founders, ex-IBM used their client machines. They
did this for many years developing their products on-site. All the development
would be off-site on paper. To start work they'd walk in with decks of cards
which represented their software product. The book also described the
development of ABAP ~ <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABAP> A lot of technical
knowledge went into doing this. Great read.

