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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 March 2019
Software has come a long way from the days of plug board wiring and multi-step computations which were characteristic of the 1950s, In the early days, hardware development led software development partly because the evolution of the hardware was so rapid and partly because the software was primarily developed for specific units. In those days the major cost was in the hardware and the software development generally involved only salary for relatively few individuals. Modern computer costs are now within the reach of the individual, and the money that goes into programming and programs is now the major cost.
This paper reviews some of the steps in the evolution of software as it affected the analysis of powder diffraction data. Many “new” programs are adaptations of earlier routines to a different computer platform, but there are many truly new programs implementing inproved concepts for extracting crystal information from the digitized diffraction data.