Saturday, July 30, 2005

Update on the origin of the term "middleware". Someone (named simply "Don") saw my entry on the origin of the term middleware and was nice enough to email me a reference to an even earlier citation from 1968! The term middleware was used in the famous report  of the 1968 NATO Software Engineering Conference: I'd heard of the famous NATO Software Engineering conf/paper but never seen it. It seems like middleware may be as old as software. I find it very interesting that in 1968, it was used to refer to software used to adapt generic file system functionality to specific application functionality needs. More generally, I guess you could call middleware "software in the middle of application software and system software." 6:54:05 AM