[cweiss]

I'd love a citation on that. Not to prove you right/wrong, I'd just love to see the definitive etymology of "Application" to describe software. I'm trying to remember what 'software' was called in the mainframe docs I looked at back then.

Wikipedia says: `The first modern theory of software was proposed by Alan Turing in his 1935 essay Computable numbers with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem (decision problem).[2]`, but I think that was being used as a verb, not noun.

[geophile]

Actually, I think I know a little about the etymology. There was (and is) "systems programming" and "application programming". I suspect the term "application" comes from there.

[geophile]

I don't have a citation, just my memory.