thumb|Software written in the JavaScript language Software consists of computer programs that instruct the execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications.
Software is a collection of computer programs and instructions that tell a computer what to do, along with the design documents and plans that go into creating them. It matters because software is what enables computers to actually perform useful tasks—without it, a computer would be just an inactive machine.
AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.
thumb|Software written in the JavaScript language Software consists of computer programs that instruct the execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications.
The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital computers in the mid-20th century. Early programs were written in the machine language specific to the hardware. The introduction of high-level programming languages in 1958 allowed for more human-readable instructions, making software development easier and more portable across different computer architectures. Software in a programming language is run through a compiler or interpreter to execute on the architecture's hardware. Over time, software has become complex, owing to developments in networking, operating systems, and databases.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).