Waterfall has no such history in the software domain. Analogizing software to construction has a long and worthless history, and it has failed to produce one actionable insight that I'm aware of. (It has produced some really dangerous pronouncements about how software engineering should be done, of the kind that you can crash and wreck a company on, though, so there's that.)
The problem is that construction has a completely, radically different cost model than software. If they could possible throw up one building today, tweak it, and throw up another tomorrow, they'd go iterative too. Instead, they have horrifying implementation costs that have no analogy to software; if Waterfall "works" for them it is only because they have no other choices. That's hardly a ringing endorsement, as wpietri observes.
The problem is that construction has a completely, radically different cost model than software. If they could possible throw up one building today, tweak it, and throw up another tomorrow, they'd go iterative too. Instead, they have horrifying implementation costs that have no analogy to software; if Waterfall "works" for them it is only because they have no other choices. That's hardly a ringing endorsement, as wpietri observes.