Everything, in the order it was filed

Eighteen pieces across six sections. This is the complete list; the section pages carry the same material with the lead pieces given room.

The spreadsheet war, and who shipped first

The first one made the machine worth buyingVisiCalc, written by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, is the reason businesses bought the hardware it ran on.
Lotus owned the spreadsheet until Excel took Windows firstLotus 1-2-3 dominated DOS. Excel shipped for Windows earlier and better, and the platform decided the application.
Every finance team runs on something nobody documentedSpreadsheet macros became load-bearing infrastructure without ever being treated as software, which is why they outlive their authors.

The month-end close is the deadline the software exists forAn accounting system is shaped by one recurring event: the period close, and everything else is arranged around it.
An auditor needs to see who changed whatAudit trails are a legal requirement before they are a feature, which constrains how these systems can be built.
Small-business accounting is a different product entirelyQuickBooks and Sage serve a market where the constraint is the operator's time rather than the organisation's complexity.

Renting software was the whole argumentSalesforce launched in 1999 arguing that software should be rented and run by somebody else, which was contested for a decade.
The pricing model shapes the product more than the codePer-seat and consumption licensing pull a product in opposite directions, and the billing decision reaches the roadmap.
The argument was never only about serversOn-premise versus hosted is a question about control, audit and exit as much as about where the machines physically sit.

A paper published in 1970 still decides your schemaEdgar F. Codd's relational model gave data a mathematical basis, and the systems built on it are still the default fifty years on.
One company built a business on being first to ship itOracle turned the relational model into a commercial database earlier than its competitors and priced accordingly.
Getting data out is the product's real moatMigration cost, not licence cost, is what keeps a customer — which is why export is always the least-finished part of a system.

A distributor went bankrupt during an ERP rolloutThe FoxMeyer collapse in 1996 became the standard citation for an implementation that took the company with it.
An order system went live at the worst possible weekHershey's 1999 go-live coincided with its peak season, and the fulfilment failure was visible on shelves.
Half a billion spent, then abandonedLidl ended its SAP programme in 2018 after years of work, reportedly because the system could not be reconciled with how the business already counted stock.
The extreme case, and it convicted peopleThe Post Office Horizon scandal is the furthest a software defect has reached into people's lives, and the record is now extensive.

A fighting style defined by what it was matched againstThe thraex fought with a small square shield and a curved sica, and the pairing with the murmillo is the point — each was built to test the other.
A small shield is a decision about mobilityThe parmula covered less and weighed less, which set the whole tempo of the match.