The transistor was funded by Bell Labs.

Spending money is not the solution. Spending money in a way that doesn't go to subcontractors is part of the solution. Building shelters beyond cots in a stadium is part of the solution. Building housing is a large part of actually solving the problem. People have tried just giving the money but without a way to convert cash to housing the money doesn't help. Also studies by people smarter then me suggest that without sufficient supply the money ends up going to landlords and pushing up housing costs anyway.

Basic research and mainframe support contracts. Also they bought RedHat.

They were selling software as a service in the IBM 360 days. Relabeling a concept and buying Redhat don't count as investments.

What is your reason for believing that IBM was selling software as a service in the IBM 360 days?

What hardware did the users of this service use to connect to the service?

Hardware was part of the service, obviously.

It is very misleading or outright perverse to write "they were selling software as a service in the IBM 360 days" when there was no public network that could be used to the deliver the service. (There were wide-area networks, but each one was used by a single organization and possibly a few of its most important customers and suppliers, hence the qualifier "public" above.)

But anyways, my question to you is, was there any software that IBM charged money for as opposed to providing the software at no additional cost with the purchase or rental of a computer?

I do know that no one sold software software (i.e., commercial off-the-shelf software) in the 1960s: the legal framework that allowed software owners to bring lawsuits for copyright violations appeared in the early 1980s.

There was an organization named SHARE composed of customers of IBM whereby one customer could obtain software written by other other customers (much like the open-source ecosystem) but I don't recall money ever changing hands for any of this software except a very minimal fee (orders of magnitude lower than the rental or purchase price of a System/360, which started at about $660,000 in 2025 dollars).

Also, IIUC most owners or renters of a System/360 had to employ programmers to adapt the software IBM provided. There is software with that quality these days, too (.e.g, ERP software for large enterprises) but no one calls that a software as a service.

Replying to myself:

>except a very minimal fee

the fee would be for membership SHARE. The fee (if it even existed) would not have been passed on to the entity that paid to create the software.

Ah, nice, now you're stalking me in the comment section.

Well done, totally normal behavior.

The Smart for Two existed with an internal combustion engine.

This is the reason that everyone at my university said to just take the Applied version of Calculus 1 and 2 t avoid the proofs.

Only over the air TV is regulated by the FCC. Films and non broadcast TV are only regulated if they contain obscene content. If anything there was more regulation of film production in the past. Hayes Code etc.

Exploring unsophisticated investors. Trading on margin used to be for extremely experienced and educated people working for a large financial institution. The risk of margin trading is extreme with unlimited losses.

Losses on long positions are limited to the value at risk. It does not matter whose money it is.