Software Industry

Software Industry

The concept of software was developed well over 100 years earlier, in 19th century England. Charles Babbage[58] came up with the Analytical Engine, which is claimed to being the world’s first computer. The Difference Engine was more complex than anything at the time, a machine that could solve second-level differential equations. Alan Turing[59] conceived the Turing Machine in 1935, or Decision Problem, which involved the relationship between mathematical symbols and the quantities they represented. Designed by John W. Mauchly[60], the first electronic computer was the ENIAC, which included the calculation of ballistic tables, which were needed in enormous quantities to help the artillery fire their weapons at the correct angles. But what is Software?[61]. Computer software, is that part of a computer system that consists of encoded information or computer instructions, in contract to the physical hardware from which the system is built. In computer science and software engineering, computer software is all information processed by computer, programs and data. Computer hardware and software require each other and neither can be realistically used on its own. Software refers not just about programming and programming languages. But about producing and selling the products made by programming (languages) as well. In the beginning of so called “Information Age” computers were programmed by “programming” direct instructions it. This was done by setting switches or making connections to different logical units by wires (circuitry). The first programming was done by typing in 1’s or 0’s that were stored different information carriers. In the early 50’s programmers started to let the machines do apart of the job. This was called automatic coding and made live a lot easier for the early programmers. The first company to provide software products and services was Computer Usage Company in 1955. The word Software did not appear in print until 1960s. The industry did not expand until the early 1960s, almost immediately after computers were first sold in mass-produced quantities. In the early 1960s included Advanced Computer Techniques, Automatic Data Processing, Applied Data Research, and Informatic General. The computer/hardware makers started bundling operating systems, systems software and programming environment with their machines. When Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) brought a relatively low-prices microcomputer to market, it brought computing within the 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 personal computer (PC) in the mid-1970s, which brought desktop computing to the office worker for the first time. In the following years, it also created a growing market for games, applications, and utilities. DOS, Microsoft’s first operating system product, was the dominant operating system at the time.   AI[62] is the intelligence exhibited by machines. An intelligent machine is a flexible rational agent that perceives it’s environment and takes actions that maximize it’s chance of success at an arbitrary goal. But for this to make reality new programming languages were needed. And strange enough these languages were developed parallel to the other languages, languages that could mimic intelligence.

Programming became an 80 hours a week job, and in the late 1980’s the Graphical User Interfaces were created by the same manufacturers that made software like C, Delphi, Clipper VO, and other languages to expedite the creation of software. Though this kind of interface stemmed from as early as the 1960, the idea never took off until the early 1990’s. The drag and drop interface was introduced by the MacIntosh, and changed the world of PC’s forever. During the ARPANET project, networks were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s using a variety of communications protocols. Led to the development of protocols for internetworking, by which multiple separate networks could be joined into a single network of networks. In 1982, the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) was introduced as the standard networking protocol on the ARPANET. In the 1980s, the work of British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee on the World Wide Web theorized protocols linking hypertext documents into a working system, marking the beginning of the modern Internet. Since the mid- 1990s, the Internet has had a revolutionary impact on culture and commerce, including the rise of near-instant communication by electronic mail, instant messaging, voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone calls, two-way interactive video calls, and the World Wide Web with it's discussion forums, blogs, social networking, and online shopping sites. The global communication landscape was almost instant in historical terms: it only communicated 1% of the information flowing through two-way telecommunications networks in the year 1993, already 51% by 2000, and more than 97% of the telecommunication information by 2007. Growth continues today driven by ever greater amounts of online information, commerce, entertainment, and social networking. During the 1990s, much attention was paid in the IT industry to outsourcing, or the phenomenon of contracting out all or part of IT function. High costs made it so that it was cheaper to develop in low cost countries, growing to a whole new dimension known as “offshoring”. Data communications and voice telephony costs are now so low, and bandwidth so broad, and the Internet so ubiquitous, that it is a simple matter to run an applications development center offshore. In the early years of the 21st century, another successful business model has arisen for hosted software, called software-as-a-service, or SaaS[63] is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. It is sometimes referred to as “on-demand software”. SaaS is typically accessed by users using a thin client via a web browser. It is part of the nomenclature of cloud computing, along with infrastructure as a service, platform as service, desktop as a service, managed software as a service, mobile backend as service, and information technology management as a service. The Software Industry is today going through major transformations; some will call it a digital revolution. The increase in the mobile applications, the ease of use, the inspiration of the cloud. The amount of data that is driven through the organizations, connect and analyze concerns is causing a fundamental shift in the software industry. The consumption of technology has been so that the consumer tolerated the risk, but today the consumer wants to pay for value and technology when they actually use that. Today, technology is crucial to success in our everyday life. In the Future, technology will be ALL. The countries that have the strongest IT industries will prevail over those that are underdeveloped, or don’t understand the impact of technology in everyday’s life.