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The beginning
The Early Days of Software
Computer scientist Tom Kilburn is responsible for writing the world’s very first piece of software, which was run at 11 a.m. on June 21, 1948, at the University of Manchester in England. Fortran, one of the very first higher-level programming languages, was originally published in 1957. The next year, statistician John Tukey coined the word “software” in an article about computer programming. -
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Personal computers
In the 1970s and 1980s, software hit the big time with the arrival of personal computers. Apple released the Apple II, its revolutionary product, to the public in April 1977. Many significant software applications, including AutoCAD, Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel, were released in the mid-1980s. -
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Mobile devices
The worlds very first mobile phone call was made on April 3, 1973. In 1993 IBM released the first publicly available “smartphone” and in 1996 Palm OS hit the market, bringing PDA’s to the masses. In 1999, RIM released the very first Blackberry 850 device and quickly became the worlds fastest growing company. Then, in 2007, Apple changed computing with the release of the iPhone. This is when mobile computing really found its place and mobile applications began to explode. -
Open-source
Open-source software, another major innovation in the history of software development, first entered the mainstream in the 1990s, driven mostly by the use of the internet. The Linux kernel, which became the basis for the open-source Linux operating system, was released in 1991. Interest in open-source software spiked in the late 1990s, after the 1998 publication of the source code for the Netscape Navigator browser. Also noteworthy is the release of Java by Sun Microsystems in 1995. -
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Software development today
Today, software has become ubiquitous, even in places that you might not expect it, from crock pots to nuclear submarines. Some programming languages, like C and Cobol, have survived the test of time and are still in use. Other languages, such as Java and Python, are somewhat younger and have been used in countless software development projects. Still others, such as Apple’s Swift programming language for iOS or Go Open source, are relatively new and exciting.