INTRODUCTION TO SOFTWARE

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. Using the programming languages, software are produced and then sold.
History of software development
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 anywhere. This is because some are rather new or it is used by small group
of specialized professionals or 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 are constantly renewed. 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
The creation of software also went in large but distinguishable steps. Sometimes certain
software which already existed was reintroduced as new because the invention was not
published earlier or even prohibited to be made public (due to war, secrecy acts etc.) or two
parties came out with the same software at the same time and they solved their disputes by legal
means.
The development of software depended on the problems faced by different groups of
people. Whenever a problem needed to be solved, a machine was built. And when some sort of
instruction was nThe development of software can be listed briefly as follows.
1. The earliest practical form of programming was probably done by Jacquard (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 technology of punched cards was later adapted by (IBM's) Recording and Tabulating
Company to process data.
2. Then Ada Lovelace wrote a rudimentary program (1843) for the Analytical Machine,
designed by Charles Babbage in 1827, but the machine never came into operation.
3. Then there was George Boole (1815-1864), a British mathematician, who proved the
relation between mathematics and logic with his algebra of logic (BOOLEAN algebra or
binary logic) in 1847.
4. Then John Von Neumann developed two important concepts that directly affected the path
of computer programming languages. The first concept was known as “shared program
technique”. The second concept was “conditional control transfer”. (www.softlord.com).
5. It took Claude Shannon (1916-2001) who wrote a thesis (A Mathematical Theory of
Communication in the Bell System Technical Journal -1948) on how binary logic could be
used in computing to complete the software concept of modern computing
(http://www.princeton.edu/~ferguson/adw/programming_languages.shtml)
The major languages developed since 1957, were FORTRAN, COBOL, LISP, ALGOL, Pascal,
C, C++, and Java.eeded it was designed or written. This became programming.