Software in the 1960s as Concept, Service, and Product

5 The term software is newer than most of the things that it is today used to describe. Many data-processing pioneers assumed that applying their electronic computers to specific administrative tasks would be straightforward. While they realized that the new machines would require programming, many expected this to be a one-time, rapid, and easily compartmentalized job, firmly subordinate to the larger task of business analysis. They soon discovered that application program creation was costly, difficult, and ongoing. By the mid-1950s, they had come to care a great deal about programming. 1 But only around 1960, however, would a well-informed data-processing manager have nodded knowl-edgably if software came up in conversation. During the 1950s, the term was not used, although hardware was already well known as a colloquial term for computer equipment. When software did achieve currency, it was as hardware's complement, describing everything else the computer manufacturer provided. This ensured that term's widespread, if ill-defined, use. By the mid-1970s, accepted linguistic usage of software had shifted toward " programs and other operating information used by a computer " offered by today's Concise Oxford English Dictionary. Software became a synonym for computer program, excluding perhaps only a proces-sor's microcode and the firmware burned into permanent memory. However, for much of the 1960s, software was commonly understood in a narrower sense, as what was later called systems software—programs used to construct other programs , or operating systems to control computer hardware. During the early 1960s, computer manufacturers dramatically stepped up their efforts in this area. IBM, for example, had gradually broadened the range of system tools it shipped—from none with the first 701s, to symbolic assemblers and loaders with the 650 and 704, to increasingly complex input–output (I/O) and control programs with its second-generation transistorized machines. Cobol's arrival challenged every computer manufacturer to produce compilers for this complex high-level language , an effort that frequently strained the state of the art to the breaking point and beyond. A 1962 Honeywell advertisement touted the firm's expertise in this new field, defining software as " automatic programming aids that simplify the task of telling the computer 'hardware' to do its job " and observing that the " three basic categories of software " were assembly systems , compilers, and operating systems. 3 This was clearly what a Datamation editorial writer had in mind, when observing that the well-publicized potentials of software have been riddled …