Consilient Network· The graph of everyone who built this · Add your entry ↗
Story path

A man invented software-as-a-service in 1975. His grandson did it again, not knowing

A man built a hosted application service in his basement in 1975. His grandson arrived at the same model independently in the nineties. Other people built it both times.

4 stopsFor: Anyone in SaaS, cloud, or platform economicsAll paths
He thought it was foolish for companies to own computers. So he bought machines with his daughter's inheritance and ran software for a liquor store.
The path

Follow it in order

Each stop is a page in the graph. The order is an argument — but every one of them is also a door into the rest of it, so you can leave the path wherever it stops being useful.

Where it lands

What the path is for

The point

Both ideas produced enormous downstream value and no attribution, because no mechanism existed to record what a contribution caused. That is not a grievance. It is the specification.

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