software history

This part will be different from the History of the computer, no chronological travel trough software-land, but a collection of articles and assays on software.

Software has a long history and as far as the facts are known to us we will give them to you. When missing stories, data, or other information are shared to us they will be put on this site. If you have any comments of suggestions regarding this page or any other page please do not hesitate to contact us.

A simple question: "What is software?" A very simple answer is: Hardware you can touch, software you can't. But that is too simple indeed.

But when talking about software you talk about programming and programming languages. But about producing and selling the products made by programming (languages) as well.

There are over 300 different ("common") computer languages in existence, apart from the various dialects stemming from one of them. Most of them can be classified in definable groups, but others don’t belong to anything. Some because they are rather new or the use of them was or is never wide spread and only used by a small specialized professionals or groups of scientists requiring these dialects. This is often the case with a specific language that was designed for just one purpose, e.g. telecommunication or supercomputing.
Some languages are even dead languages, some others are revived and expanded upon again, and there are ones that constantly rejuvenate. In the latter case a programmer is sometimes wondering whether he or she is not just upgrading to a newer version but instead learning a complete new language.

How It All Started

It shouldn't be a big surprise that the creation or software also went in large but distinguishable steps. Compared with hardware there were fewer developments that went parallel or overlapping. In rare cases developments were reinvented sometimes because the development or invention was not published, even prohibited to be made public (war, secrecy acts etc.) or became known at the same time and after (legal)discussions the "other" party won the honors.

The earliest practical form of programming was probably done by Jaquard (1804, France). He designed a loom that performed predefined tasks through feeding punched cards into a reading contraption. This new technology allowed carpets and tissues to be manufactured with lower skills and even with fewer people. The little kid sitting under the loom changing rods and other things vanished. One single person could now handle a loom. That this met resistance from the weavers leaves no question. The same thing happened in England during the industrial revolution there. Even a movement came up called: Luddites (anti technology or just concerned citizens fighting for their bread?)