Software progress

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The hardware progress we have enjoyed would be meaningless if it did not lead to new forms of software and applications. The first computers worked primarily on numeric data, but early computer scientists understood their potential for working on many types of application and data. By 1960, researchers were experimenting non- numeric data like text, images, audio and video; however, these lab prototypes were far too expensive for commercial use. Technological improvement steadily extended the range of affordable data types. The following table shows the decades in which the processing of selected types of data became economically feasible:

But none of this would have been possible without software, and we have seen evolution in the software we use, and, underlying that, the platforms we use to develop and distribute it. 1 Let us consider the evolution of software development and distribution platforms from batch processing to time sharing, personal computers, local area networks, and wide area networks.