Applied Data Research
Applied Data Research (ADR) was a large software vendor from the 1960s until the mid-1980s. ADR is often described as "the first independent software vendor".
| Founded | 1959 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Martin Goetz, Sherman Blumenthal, Ellwood Kauffman, Dave McFadden, Bernard Riskin, Robert Wickenden, and Stephen Wright |
| Defunct | 1986 |
| Fate | Acquired |
| Successor | Ameritech |
| Headquarters | , |
| Services | independent contract programming |
Founded in 1959, ADR was originally a contract development company. ADR eventually built a series of its own products. ADR's widely used major packages included: Autoflow for automatic flowcharting, which is often cited as one of the first commercial software applications; Roscoe, a remote job submission environment; MetaCOBOL, an extensible macro processor for the COBOL language; and The Librarian, for source-code management.
The company's original office was in a small office building along U.S. Route 206 in Princeton Township, New Jersey. Later during the 1960s, they were part of a data center located on Route 206 across from Princeton Airport. The center was destroyed by fire in 1969 when a light plane crashed into it on approach to the airport, but there were no serious injuries among either the pilot or the workers in the building. In 1980, the company moved to a facility further along Route 206, that was just north of Princeton in Montgomery Township, New Jersey.