One of the main functions of the venerable and massive Oxford English Dictionary is to record the earliest known use of a word (or sense of a word) in English.
The current edition of the dictionary dates the word software back to 1960, though researchers have discovered an 1850 occurrence of the term in a very different context–for distinguishing two types of garbage, where “soft-ware” referred to matter that would decompose and “hard-ware” to anything else.