The earliest known use of the term software to describe computer programs dates back to 1958, says librarian Fred R. Shapiro of the Yale Law School in New Haven, Conn. He searched for the word among scholarly journals electronically archived in the JSTOR (Journal STORage) database (http://www.jstor.org/) at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Shapiro hit pay dirt in an article by Princeton University statistics professor John W.
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