By
N.Kranthi Bhushan
1201010061
Software Engineering-B
Software Industry
The software industry includes businesses for development, maintenance and publication of software that are using different business models, mainly either "license/maintenance based" (On Premise) or "cloud based" (such as Saas, PaaS, IaaS etc etc) . The industry also includes software services, such as training, documentation, and consulting.
History
The word "software" had been coined as a prank by at least 1953, but did not appear in print until the 1960s.[1] Before this time, computers were programmed either by customers, or the few commercial computer vendors of the time, such as UNIVAC and IBM. The first company founded to provide software products and services was Computer Usage Company in 1955.[2]
The software industry expanded in the early 1960s, almost immediately after computers were first sold in mass-produced quantities. Universities, government, and business customers created a demand for software. Many of these programs were written in-house by full-time staff programmers. Some were distributed freely between users of a particular machine for no charge. Others were done on a commercial basis, and other firms such as Computer Sciences Corporation (founded in 1959) started to grow. The computer/hardware makers started bundling operating systems, systems software and programming environments with their machines.
When Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) brought a relatively low-priced microcomputer to market, it brought computing within reach of many more companies and universities worldwide, and it spawned great innovation in terms of new, powerful programming languages and methodologies. New software was built for microcomputers, so other manufacturers including IBM, followed DEC's example quickly, resulting in the IBM AS/400 amongst others.
The industry expanded greatly with the rise of the personal computer ("PC") in the mid-1970s, which