is software a set of programs or a program?

Question

this question is about computer software

Answer 1

It goes for both. You can say one software ten softwares.

Answer 2

Software can be almost any collection of code. Sometimes there's just 1 program. But even then, there may be otehr code to allow the computer to run the program.

I started writing software in the late 70's & it was all alot simpler then. There were big changes, as smaller machines became able to communicate with mainframe & even do work themselves.

First came client/server where the main portion of the software sat on a server marchine somewhere & 1 or more individual machines ran a client portion of the software.

Then that slowly changed, when Java cam along, with things like 3-tier architecture and later n-tier architecture.

Things like J2EE & .NET improved things further, as did packages such as SAP, Peoplesoft & Siebel.

Now I work on SOA's Service Oriented Architetures. SOA is a design style or an application framework, if you prefer. The basic concept of an encapsulated service containing a single business function. The service can be packaged (SAP, etc.) or a custom development - perhaps a wrapped legacy mainframe process).The service may be exposed via .NET of java web service & the web serivce generaly talks with the service via a messaging technology such as Websphere MQ. The architecture allows far creater internal AND external (e.g. B2B) use of the services - which are now assets.

That is about 0.001% of what's going on in Enterprise (big business) software right now - there is so much innovation going on - but 75% of all enterprises are either actively invseting in SOA or are considering doing so - looks like I have a job for the next few years - not bad for an old schoold COBOL programmer - is it !

And I never said a word about web design - I'll leave that to someone else :-)

Answer 3

I'm not too sure of the history of the word software but I know that, when it come to computers, the word hardware was meant to talk about EVERYTHING that you can physically touch, and software is actually the conceptual contents in the hardware... does that makes sense?.

when you look at a blank CD, and then burn something into it, something had changed, now it contains either data, of programs, the contents is known as software, were the disk itself is hardware... like in the hardware store...he he

recently, the word software is understood as programs, and not the data that you feed to those programs, so in the end, when you hear the word "software" is 99% possible that is being referred to at least one program (which can be built of many other small pieces such as dll's) or even a set of programs in a suite... like Norton works for example, or adobe cs2 which includes photoshop, illustrator, in-design etc... see? the whole of it and all of it's pieces is known as software.

Answer 4

software is generally defined as a program or set of programs that enables a computer to perform a task.

Answer 5

Programming...in certain machine languages... is a set of groups of routines..and sub-routines that work together to form an application....that gives you software in a bundle