Článek
Software is in everything and it’s everywhere.
Humans are used to things that we can see and touch. We live in the physical world of cars, washing machines, telephones and hair dryers. This is hardware — physical tools, machinery, and other durable equipment. Hardware provides us with utility that’s very real to us. But at some point we started to hit against hardware’s limits. VCRs in the 90s were great for recording whatever was on television (to watch again later) as long as you were there to hit the record button as the show was about to start. Wouldn’t it be even better if you could record something that was on TV without having to be there to press the record button? To be able to tell your VCR to start recording at 7pm and stop at 8pm so you could go out for dinner? Yes, that would be much better!
Well, it turns out that to be able to tell hardware what to do in a flexible way you needed to be able to program it — you need software. We started expanding the capabilities of hardware by programming it and making software. This is especially true when it comes to computer hardware. A computer at its core is a smart calculator. What gives computers their power depends on what you can program them to do — calculate the trajectory of a missile rocket or tally up client bank records for accounting purposes. And this is when software took its first big bite into the world.
Early software was bespoke, written exactly for the application it was going to be used for and the hardware it was going to be run on. If you had written a piece of accounting software for company A it was unlikely that that same piece of software was going to work at company B without a lot of rework. Software wasn’t very portable.
Enter Microsoft 2003.
Bill Gates foresaw that the increasing number of computers and PCs being produced were going to need software that would handle the basic inner workings of CPU, RAM and Disk storage within the computer. This would free developers to focus building applications that solved a user problem instead of writing common code to orchestrate the computer’s hardware e.g. things like reading/writing files. Disk Operating System aka DOS was born and would solve exactly that problem, and in doing so it set the stage for the PC market boom of the late 20th century with Windows. Bill Gates didn’t invent the Operating System (OS) as a concept but he sure made it mainstream.
Software exploded in the 90s and Microsoft dominated. Its Office suite was everywhere and it made offices much more productive. Computers were very utilitarian and focussed around work versus play. Personal computing as we know it was still in its infancy. PCs were becoming more useful as more and more software was written for them. Different applications like word processing, spreadsheets, solitaire and eventually web browsing were expanding the possibilities of what you could do. Yet PCs weren’t very sexy. They all looked the same — cream coloured towers with matching hefty CRT monitors.
