Software

The term software refers to any and all types of computer programs that exist only as virtual data inside of a computer. Because this data is stored in the form of bytes, it's possible to delete software (erase its data from a hard disk), copy software (clone the data), and download software through the internet.

The opposite of software is called hardware in a computer, which refers to its physical parts, the ones you can touch. It's not possible to delete your CPU, copy your mouse, or download more RAM. This is due to hardware being made out of physical atoms, not of virtual bytes.

Some examples of software would be applications that you can execute by clicking twice on them, such as your web browser, computer games, Microsoft Word, Excel, etc., Photoshop, and so on.

A phone's apps are software, too, since they can be downloaded, copied, and deleted. They're made of bytes. In this case, the hardware that we can't copy is the phone itself. This is also true for the modern smartphone as well as the old cellphones, the dumbphones.

There are softwares that aren't executable by themselves. Plugins; libraries of code and runtimes (Java, .NET, Flash) that are used by other programs; image, audio and video codecs; and drivers of hardware are softwares as well.

The operating system is a software. This includes Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android—they're all software, since it's possible to install an operating system copying its data from an installation CD to a hard disk..

Although all software can be copied, since they're data, not all software is stored in a place where it can be modified, replaced, or deleted. There's a type of storage called ROM memory (read-only memory) that is read-only. That is, once the bytes are written to this sort of memory, there's no way to alter them, and, with that, there's no way to erase them or overwrite them with other bytes of other software. The ROM is used to store firmware (software that controls hardware directly), such as the BIOS of the motherboard that is executed before the operating system and is responsible for starting it up.

According to Paul Niquette¹, who claims to have invented the term software in 1953 when he was 19 years old, the word software was simply a way to distinguish the computer itself from the program that it executed.

Note that, at the time, computers weren't like the modern PCs that we have today, with many software parts. They were monolithic and were "unable to do anything but consume electrical power until a "programmer" came along to "program" it". That is, the function of a "computer" was to run ONE program, which was developed for that computer specifically.

Paul worked with one of the only 16 digital computers in the world. From what he says, each computer executed programs in a different manner, and with that a program made for one computer wouldn't work in any other computer of the world.

The term software was created to separate the machine, the hardware, that couldn't be modified, to the program which could be edited. The hardware came from a factory. The software came from a programmer. The hardware was rigid (hard), difficult to alter, while the software was malleable (soft), easy to alter.

In these old computers, a good part of the "computing," of the logic of the computer, of its algorithms, depended on how were produced the physical components of the computer. They were dependent on the design of the hardware. If each hardware had a different design, the softwares would be incompatible.

In modern computers, the idea remains the same, however, the modern hardware is so powerful, it can do so many things, that most software is able to run in pretty much any hardware, and, with that, we're able to copy software from one computer to another without any problem.

1. In October, 1953, I coined the word 'software.', accessed 2023-11-20. ↩︎