History of computer software

Hardware is physical and may be seen and touched whereas software is intangible and is an intellectual undertaking by a team of programmers. The initial computers did not have a stored program, or what became known later as software.

The earliest high level programming language was Plankalkul developed by Konrad Zuse in 1946.

John von Neumann described the concept of storing a program and data in 1945 during the construction of ENIAC. However, the first computer to function with a stored program was EDSAC at Cambridge University, England in 1949.

The ENIAC was at first controlled by wiring as if it were gigantic plugboard, but later Nick Metropolis and Dick Clippenger converted it to a machine that was programmed from ballistic tables, which were huge racks of dials which decimals digit of the program could be set via the knobs of the decimals switches.

Grace M. was an early pioneer in the development of initial programming languages. Her initial work started on the Mark 1 at Harvard University in 1944.

Software technology during this period was very primitive. The first programs were written out in machine code, i.e. programmers directly wrote on the numbers that correspond to the instructions they wanted to store in memory.

In the mid 1960s, lines of code or LOC was one of the first known measures of software seize, which referred to the number of computer instructions or source statements comprising a computer program and is usually expressed as thousand of lines of codes.

Things began to change in the 1970s, as lower cost personal computers were introduced and software began to be sold as a product.

In 1998, a group of are software users decided to create a new term to describe free software. They felt a new term was needed so users wouldn’t confuse ‘freedom’ with ‘no cost’. They coined the term ‘open source’ and started the Open Source Initiative to promote its use.
History of computer software