The software industry is one of the largest and most influential industries in the world presently. It began as early as 1830s with Charles Babbage‘s Analytical Engine, but was actually established in the late 1950s, when the use of computers for business applications expanded rapidly creating a huge demand for people with programming experience. Gradually the entrepreneurial computer software and services companies of the 1950s and 1960s, grew dramatically through the 1970s and 1980s and became a market force rivaling that of the computer hardware companies. By the 1990s it had become the supplier of technical know-how that transformed the way people worked, played and communicated every day of their lives.
| Plankalkul of Konrad Zuse | A-0 compiler of Grace Hopper |
| GISMO of David Shepard | |
| Fortran of John Backus | LISP of John McCarthy |
| OXO of Alexander Douglas | Tennis for Two of William Higinbotham |
| Logic Theorist of Newell, Simon and Shaw | Spacewar of Slug Russell |
| Sketchpad of Ivan Sutherland | UNIX of Ken Thompson |
| BASIC of John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz | VisiCalc of Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston |
| Simula of Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard | RDBMS of Edgar Codd |
| DOS of Tim Paterson | WordStar of Rob Barnaby |
| Mac OS of Apple | Aldus Pagemaker of Paul Brainerd |
| OS/400 of IBM | Photoshop of Thomas Knoll |
| Tetris of Alexey Pajitnov | Linux of Linus Torvalds |
| Windows of Microsoft |
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