The software industry has grown to become one of the cornerstones of the world economy, with nearly 10,000 independent publishers ringing up sales approaching $10 billion annually. It is an industry that is becoming most identified as a supplier of consumer goods, but it has equally served, and was in fact founded for, applications in the military, scientific research, and engineering realms.

With software engineers responsible for creating and maintaining systems that have become indispensable for communications, manufacturing, and finance, as well as for land, sea, and air travel and a broad array of safety systems, it is difficult to imagine a world without the software industry. But since this is an industry whose ascendance has been linked, self-evidently, to that of the practical applications of electronic computing, it is always instructive to remind ourselves that the software industry is still more or less in its...