eli thorkelson: Software and softness

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Software and softness

Sep 16, 2023

It’s funny that we build “software” and yet, so much of the time, our technical communities do not particularly value softness.

How do we explain this?

What makes software soft?

What makes software “soft”? It’s hard to find an adequate account of this because language evolves gradually, following obscure histories. But the history of the word is somewhat illuminating.

The term software is defined in opposition to hardware. “Hardware” is an old word that historically has not had too much philosophical baggage, as far as I can tell: in the sense of “small metal items,” the word entered the English language in the early modern period, when it meant “ware (such as fittings, cutlery, tools, utensils, or parts of machines) made of metal” (per Merriam-Webster). The term dates as far back as 1419, while the related term “hardware store” entered circulation by 1789.

The term software, by contrast, is a decidedly 20th century invention. Some say it first appeared in print in 1958 in an article by statistician John W. Tukey. Tukey wrote:

Today the “software” comprising the carefully planned interpretive routines, compilers, and other aspects of automative programming are at least as important to the modern electronic calculator as its “hardware” of tubes, transistors, wires, tapes and the like. (src)

You can see the scare quotes suggesting that at the time, this terminology was a neologism, not standard usage.

It’s unlikely that Tukey had coined the word. The engineer Paul Niquette, in an odd online autobiography (archive), recounts having discovered the term “software” as early as 1953, while working on the early computer SWAC. He says he had the following “epiphany”:

I was thinking to myself that I wanted nothing to do with the SWAC “hardware” – that the machine was the mindless means for executing my programs – a necessary evil, mostly evil. It was about at that moment, I seized upon the consummate reality of what I was doing – that what I was doing was sharply different from what [the hardware maintainer] Dr. Whitcomb was doing – that what I was doing was writing on a coding sheet, not plugging jacks into sockets, not clipping leads onto terminal posts, not soldering wires, not bending relay contacts, not replacing vacuum tubes. What I was doing was writing on a coding sheet! The exclamation point was right there in my thought back then and in my memory now.

It was October 1953 and I was experiencing an epiphany. Before my eyes, I saw my own markings carefully scrawled inside printed blocks on the coding sheet. They comprised numerical “words” – the only vocabulary the computer could understand. My coded words were not anything like those other things – those machine things, those “hardware” things. I could write down numerical words – right or wrong – and after they were were punched into cards and fed into the reader, the SWAC would be commanded to perform my mandated operations in exactly the sequence I had written them – right or wrong.

The written codes – my written codes – had absolute power over Dr. Whitcomb’s “hardware.” Then too, I could erase what I had written down and write down something different, then punch a new card and insert it into the deck. The SWAC, slavishly obedient in its hardware ways, would then be commanded to do my work differently – to do different work entirely, in fact. The writing on the coding sheet was changeable; it was decidedly not hardware. It was – well, it was “soft-ware.”

This terminology was new in the 1950s, but it emerged from a longstanding current in intellectual history. The software/hardware divide is arguably just a new permutation of a long-standing dualism in European philosophy, according to which there is a radical difference between mind and matter, the ideal and the physical.

You don’t have to read too much Plato to see how strongly-rooted this kind of dualist view can be. And it usually comes with a preference for one side over the other: the ideal gets valorized, the merely physical gets put down. That’s what Niquette was doing when he declared that software had “absolute power” over the hardware, which was “slavishly obedient” to the software’s “commands”. Mind over matter.

At the same time, in an interesting wrinkle, software was imagined as metaphorically soft because it was more “changeable” than the hardware. It’s easy to think new thoughts and write new code, while it’s hard to wire up new circuits: that’s the argument.

Does it make any sense, though?

Two kinds of “hardness”

Hardness means several quite different (orthogonal) things, two of which tend to get mashed together...