Brief introduction of software development history

The history of software industry can be traced back to 50 years ago, and it has developed for half a century.

First generation: early professional service company, 1949- 1959. The first batch of independent software companies are professional software service companies that develop customized solutions for individual customers.

In the United States, this development process was driven by several large-scale software projects, which were first subscribed by the US government and later subscribed by several large American companies. These mega-projects provided important learning opportunities for the first batch of independent American software companies, and made the United States an early protagonist in the software industry.

Second Generation: Early Software Products Company, 1959—— 1969? . 10 after the establishment of the first batch of independent software service companies, the first batch of software products appeared. They are specially developed and sold to more than one customer repeatedly. A new type of software company was born, which needed different management techniques.

The third generation: the emergence of powerful enterprise solution providers, 1969- 198 1.

IBM decided to price software and hardware separately, which once again confirmed the independence of the software industry. In the following years, more and more independent software companies broke ground to provide new products for enterprises of all sizes-it can be seen that they surpassed the products provided by hardware manufacturers. Finally, customers began to look for their software sources from suppliers other than hardware companies and decided to pay for them.

The fourth generation: customer mass market software,1981—1994. The emergence of personal computers established a brand-new software: the mass market based on personal computers submitted their products. This requires very different marketing and sales methods.

PARC laid the technical foundation for today's personal computers: Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), founded by Xerox 1969, laid the foundation for the personal computer revolution with breakthrough innovations, such as black-and-white screen, bitmap display, buttons, laser printers, word processors and networks (most notably Ethernet).

Some scientists who worked in PARC later worked for Apple and Microsoft, or set up their own companies.

Extended data:

Platforms in 1980s and 1990s: In 1980s and 1990s, many enterprise solution providers switched from proprietary operating system platforms of large computers to new platforms such as Unix( 1973), IBM OS/2 and Microsoft NT. This shift usually makes these companies make huge profits by using all their own software.

Peoplesoft, a new enterprise solution company without inheritance: the shift to an updated operating system platform allows other companies to enter this market. One of them is Peoplesoft, which was founded by Dave Duffield and Ken Morris at 1987.

They are two software engineers of Integral Systems, and they see the potential of human resource management system (HRMS) software based on personal computers. Peoplesoft can develop many vertical functional markets (such as health care and financial services) by acquiring HRMS, making itself a strong competitor of traditional enterprise solution providers.

Auxiliary partners: Most EPR companies rely heavily on partners to assist and transform their products. In large-scale system installation, the income of these partners is usually 2 to 6 times that of EPR sellers. In this way, both sides have benefited from the huge market growth since the early 1990s.

In the camp of EPR partners, especially large accounting companies, there was a very active merger-centralization in the 1980s and 1990s. The merger of KPMG in 1987, and the recent merger of PricewaterhouseCoopers/PricewaterhouseCoopers in 1998, all seem to signal the industrialization of global professional software services.

Baidu Encyclopedia-Software