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When Was Software Born? Since Ever
The first software company ever was founded in 1955, but the software is much older than that, well before it got its current name
Sixty-nine years ago, Elmer C. Kubie and John W. Sheldon founded the first company focused on software, the Computer Usage Company (CUC) [1].
A profitable business means intercepting client’s needs. What was the need? Simulating physical phenomena like the oil flow was the first need they met; then, they faced air traffic control, which, again, is simulation, and so on.
Just ten years after the end of WW2, Elmer C. Kubie and John W. Sheldon were aware that the software was an asset per se and deserved a dedicated business. That business was about simulation and automation.
In 1960, the CUC had 3 managers, 37 mathematicians, 6 physicists, and 3 engineers [1]. We couldn’t expect so many software engineers then; software engineering was forming as a profession in those years [5]. What is relevant is that 88% of the Company — the 37 mathematicians and 6 physicists — was about modeling and simulation.
But well before the rise of hardware from the 1950s onward, modeling and simulation already existed as human activities. For example, consider cartography in the 15th century…
