Software Industry

The software industry includes businesses for development, maintenance and publication of software that are using different business models, mainly either "license/maintenance based" (on-premises) or "Cloud based" (such as SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, MaaS, AaaS, etc.). The industry also includes software services, such as training, documentation, consulting and data recovery.

The word "software" was coined as a prank as early as 1953, but did not appear in print until the 1960s. Before this time, computers were programmed either by customers, or the few commercial computer vendors of the time, such as UNIVAC and IBM. The first company founded to provide software products and services was Computer Usage Company in 1955.

The software industry expanded in the early 1960s, almost immediately after computers were first sold in mass-produced quantities. Universities, government, and business customers created a demand for software. Many of these programs were written in-house by full-time staff programmers. Some were distributed freely between users of a particular machine for no charge. Others were done on a commercial basis, and other firms such as Computer Sciences Corporation (founded in 1959) started to grow. Other influential or typical software companies begun in the early 1960s included Advanced Computer Techniques, Automatic Data Processing, Applied Data Research, and Informatics General. The computer/hardware makers started bundling operating systems, systems software and programming environments with their machines.

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