History of Software

The history of software is of course very, very new. The whole IT industry is really only 67 years old, which is extraordinary. To be so close to the birth of a major new technology, a major new discipline is quite remarkable given where we've got to in those 67 years. And the progression has not been so much a progression as a stampede, because Moore's law, the rapid expansion in the power of computing and the rapid fall in the cost of computing and storage and communications has made it feasible for information technology to move into all sorts of areas of life that were never originally envisaged. What has happened is that there has been, as I said, a stampede for people to pick the low-hanging fruit. This is what's guided the development of software and information technology over the past decades and continues to do so, with a number of consequences that we will explore.