Computer Software History

There is a high likelihood that every individual from developed countries has to deal with some kind of software. Computer software is a rather broad term that is used to encompass the different types of software based on which a computer actually works. Yet, even though software engineering has become a large and profitable industry just few people known how it all started. Here one can find out more about the history of software and how it all came together.

It all started with Alan Turing who proposed a theory about software in 1935 in his essay called Computable numbers with an application to the decision problem. The term software was however not used in the written literature until 23 years later when John W Tukey used it in print. The term is commonly used to describe application software but in computer engineering this word encompasses all the information that is processed by the computer system, programs in general and data.

It is believed that the history of software as we know it began in 1946 when the first software bug was developed. Software has become in time cheaper and faster as did hardware. At first some elements of the computer were considered to be software but then they have joined the ranks of hardware. Software has constantly increased in popularity as the importance of computers has increased. Moreover, individuals started to want more from computers and this caused a need to further progress and development of the software that was being produced. For a long time however, software was bundled with the hardware by original equipment manufacturers. This meant that a new computer would have not come with pre-installed software but that the software had to be installed by the specialists working for the original equipment manufacturers. Nowadays things are much simpler since people can perform software download from the internet whenever they need a new program.