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19691776 Club

IBM puts a price on software; hardware and code will no longer come as one

Starting January 1970, IBM will bill programs and services separately from its machines, opening space for independent vendors to compete on price for the first time.

Before 1969, if you bought a computer from IBM, the software came with it — no separate price, no separate market, no independent vendors with any real room to compete. That year, IBM announced it would begin pricing its software and services separately from its hardware, effective January 1970. The decision didn't just change IBM's billing practices. It cracked open a market that hadn't formally existed, giving independent software companies the oxygen they needed to grow into an industry of their own…

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More from June 23
1972

Nixon tells Haldeman to use the CIA to block the FBI's Watergate inquiry

Six days after the break-in at Democratic headquarters, the Oval Office recording system captures the President invoking national security to shut down investigators.
1961

Twelve nations' Antarctic pact takes force; military operations and nuclear tests are now banned on the continent

The agreement, signed in 1959 after Argentine marines fired on British researchers, designates everything south of 60°S as a scientific preserve open to all signatories.
1972

Nixon signs 37 words into law; no federal program may turn away a student on the basis of sex

Senator Birch Bayh's passage, buried in the Education Amendments of 1972, draws almost no public attention at the signing.
17801776 Club
Continental troops and New Jersey militia blunt both British columns at the Rahway crossings, and the redcoats leave nearly the whole town in ashes as they pull back.
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More from Cold War America
1983

Reagan signs the King holiday bill, fifteen years after the first one was introduced

Congress passed it by wide margins, but the President had once dismissed the push behind it as "an image, not reality."
1988

A Cornell graduate student's program slips onto the Internet from a computer at MIT

Robert Tappan Morris, 23, launches it at about 8:30 p.m. from another campus so it won't trace back to Cornell; the network holds roughly 60,000 machines.
1948

The Tribune's early edition crowns Dewey; the returns say otherwise

A printers' strike pushed the press deadline hours earlier, and about 150,000 copies roll before the count turns.
1962

Tightrope flies from Johnston Island, and Operation Fishbowl is finished

A low-yield device on an XM-33 Strypi rocket ends the Atomic Energy Commission's high-altitude test series in the Pacific.
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