For some reason now forgotten, Rose Warfield decided to try to find out when the first software was written, and who did it. So she asked John about it at a time he wasn't working on other things, which, naturally, was while having lunch. Warfield talked for quite a while, once he got started and Rose scribbled down notes on a little scratch pad or a place mat or something, and took the notes home and typed them all up on the old typewriter. A year later, in 1991, Rose added an extra page to the first typed notes, using the new electric typewriter to bring things up to date until Jan. 1991, after which this manuscript record ceases.

Several more ISM software packages have been written since 1991. Roxana Cardenas developed a software for her new computer the NEXT machine. Daniel Ma, with coaching from Ben Broome and Warfield, and assistance from Jason Gan, wrote a GMU version for WINDOWS, and now in 2001 he writes from N. Carolina that he is writing another WINDOWS version which he thinks will be able to do much more than the old one. Meanwhile, Chandy in India has finally finished his latest software package, called OPMS, for OnePageManagementSystem, which he is trying to market. Bill Rodger, in Canada has a new consulting company based on a version of ISM software which he had hired a programmer to do in the mid-nineties. And there are probably other ISM versions we don't know about, since we have found that sometimes Warfield's system is used but is given another name by the entrepreneur trying to market it. I had Warfield read through this software history in Jan 2001, before sending it to GMU. Warfield said he felt it important that I recognize the difference between an algorithm and an optimization, and that Warfield himself had never done any of the optimizations, that the optimization work was done independently by each of the programmers as they devised their own software based on the original algorithms produced by Warfield. Also he made a few handwritten inked corrections to the typed pages, but seemed to think that in general my manuscript is accurate.