Prof. Dr. Klaus Allerbeck SIR London UK User Group 24.9.2004

1. Prof. Dr. Klaus AllerbeckSIR London UK User Group 24.9.2004 Recovery from the backslash?

2. Four reasons why SIR almost disappeared in Germany: • The disappearance of responsive, German-speaking, problem-oriented social science support • The decline ofmainframe computing • The German adaptation of Personal Computing • The improvement of MS-DOS SIR London UK User Group 24.9.2004

3. The STATUS gap Whereas the computing center response to SPSS had been mostly snobbish, SIR wasgreeted with interest, and occasional excitement by academic computing centers. The SPERRYcommon bank implementation of SIR by the University of Wisconsin Computing Center was anexample. While user demand was not unimportant, some computing centers unfamiliar withmodern applications software showed an active interest in how SIR handled system dependencies. SIR London UK User Group 24.9.2004

4. The STATUS gap • STATUS helped in bringing computingcenters together, if necessary, on a technical level. • STATUS shared examples and aided the exchange of approaches, solutions, recipes, helpful hints etc. • STATUS explained the neat, compact demonstrations the SIR programmers were so fond of in German and made them accessible to social scientists. SIR London UK User Group 24.9.2004

5. The STATUS Gap I do not know whether STATUS ever was a commercial success. But I am positive that we would not have been able to get off the ground without the help of STATUS. Once we had figured out the interface of the SPERRY operating system,its file structure and the Conversational Time Sharing (CTS) system, we could survive on our own after STATUS disappeared from sight. Once STATUS was gone, there was no support for new German users SIR London UK User Group 24.9.2004

6. When the mainframes faded away • University computing centers a budget for items software - such as SIR • With decentralized computing, history repeated itself: there was money made available for university departments to buy hardware • As student status is ill-defined in Germany, site licences for software are out of the question SIR London UK User Group 24.9.2004

7. When the mainframes faded away • Campaigns against "Raubkopien“ made software sharing very risky • "Virus threats" produced obstacles for data sharing • The creation of computer departments lowered the lowest common denominator among users • Communication and interaction lost its focus SIR London UK User Group 24.9.2004

8. The success of Personal Computing in Germany • The legacy of “Mittlere Datentechnik”: computers as job scare • The union response: Ergonomics, health requirements, DIN norms • Conformity to DIN 2137: the uniform German IBM clone keyboard • Starting with 16bits, PC´s replace typewriters and become “user friendly” • CP/M´s acceptance when it was obsolete SIR London UK User Group 24.9.2004

9. Hierarchical MS-DOS • A file system for the XT hard disk looking not quite like Unix • The signal that was missed: US ASCII character (Hex) • When SIR/DBMS for the PCbecame more than a feasibility demonstration, the expectation was GU • Where a little explanation would have gone a long way: the operating system interface of SIR SIR London UK User Group 24.9.2004

10. SIR in Stuttgart: A real life experiment demonstrating the success and failure of SIR in an expanding computer market. A “Gedankenexperiment”: What would have happened if there had been a German native, fluent in FORTRAN to teach SIR for the PC? The potential for recovery: real world problems and undigested “data” SIR London UK User Group 24.9.2004