The History of Software

We spend most of our days using computers at work, smartphones when we're out and about, and tablets and PCs at home. Technology, especially software, has become such an integral part of both work and daily life, it's hard to remember a world without it. In fact, finding a world without computers might be harder than you think; they have been around now for decades. Software has made the impossible possible, and the laborious and tedious, fast and easy.

On the eve of the software industry's 60th birthday, and to commemorate Capterra's 15th anniversary of helping businesses find the right software, we decided to take a look back on this History of Software and find the biggest and most forgotten-about events that impacted the industry. Take a look at our timeline: are there any big milestones that we didn't include? Where would your company fit into this history?

Congratulations to the thousands of software companies that have already helped to make history. With the software industry continuing to grow, we think there is a lot of history still to be made!