“In October 1953,” begins the first sentence of the introduction to technologist Paul Niquette’s online book The Software Age, “I coined the word ‘software.’” A young programmer at UCLA—which boasted one of the just sixteen digital computers that existed in the world at that time—Niquette had, he claims, come up with the term as a jokey way of distinguishing the programs people like him were creating from the physical “hardware” of digital computers themselves.106
Software didn’t actually appear in print until five years later—courtesy of American statistician John Tukey—but enjoyed informal usage among early computer scientists for some years before then. Hardware, meanwhile, has been with us in some form for far longer; and it is to the form of the word hardware that we ultimately owe numerous elements of modern computing terminology.
In the sense of equipment made of metal, hardware has existed in English since the fifteenth century, deriving ultimately from the Old English words heard, “hard, firm, solid”; and waru, “a valuable object.”
The notion of “hardware stores” had become common in America by the start of the nineteenth century, and it made obvious sense to extend the term to describe the machine components that went into building the earliest computers—a usage first recorded in 1947, and common by the end of the 1950s. Hence Niquette’s gag, and the coining of a term for something new to the world: an engineered, functional tool consisting entirely of information.
As well as a huge number of phrases and specialisms, one effect of the introduction of software as a punning companion term to hardware has been a new etymological life for the word ware itself. This is most obvious in the formation of further words to describe types of program: spyware (software intended surreptitiously to track users’ actions), malware (a generic term for malicious software, intended to cause harm or somehow exploit users), freeware (free software), shareware (free trials of software intended to be shared with others), and so on.
Beyond this, ware has also become a new word in its own right among some computer users, and hackers in particular. Mutated into the plural form “warez”—the z for s substitution being a typical swap in hacker subculture—the word has come to describe pirated versions of various kinds of software, usually distributed illegally or via shadowy, informal services.
“The warez scene”—sometimes shortened simply to “The Scene”—is thus the semi-official term for the international community of those who specialize in distributing pirated software, as well as numerous other kinds of media content: films, television shows, music, video games. It’s a scene that has been a part of the internet since the early 1970s—well before the world wide web came along—but that new technologies and systems have fed. It’s also a far cry from innocent punning among the world’s few computer programmers half a century earlier; although not, perhaps, from that original Old English sense of something precious, and thus eminently worth stealing.