The following article is excerpted from West's Encyclopedia of American Law . The set of instructions, procedures, and routines that direct a computer to perform specific actions.
Software instructs a computer what to do.
Computer software is the general term for a variety of procedures and routines that harness the computational power of a computer to produce, for example, a general operating system that coordinates the basic workings of the computer or specific applications that produce a database, a financial spreadsheet, a written document, or a game. Computer programmers use different types of programming languages to create the intricate sets of instructions that make computing possible. Until the personal computer revolution began in the 1980s, software was written mainly for business, government, and the military, which employed large mainframe computers as hardware. With the introduction of personal computers, which have rapidly increased in power and performance, software has emerged as an important commercial product that can be marketed to individuals and small business as well as big business and the government. Software is, under the law, intellectual property and therefore entitled to protection from persons who seek to exploit it illegally.