app which is short for application is actually an old term from at least the 1970's. I believe the usage may come from a computer program that is applied to spe

app which is short for application is actually an old term from at least the 1970's. I believe the usage may come from a computer program that is applied to specific problem. You get the term computer application and program application with the latter eventually evolving to just application. For example in Byte January 1977 "What if you just wrote a nifty new program that runs in 16 K but your system only has 8 K to spare? Do you buy another 8 K before you run this? Ofcourse not. You logically break the program into smaller pieces, which are stored in a direct access device. When your application comes to need a program segment which is not in main memory, it goes out to the direct access storage device and loads the needed segment. Since the maximum delay of an inexpensive floppy unit is about 0.75 second and it has a data rate of 250 K bytes per second, there will be little pause before the program is again executing. Further, most of the delay is from arm positioning motions, so if all the data and program segments are on adjacent tracks the delay will typically average less than 1/30 of a second. Even ifa person is waiting for the results, a large amount of such swapping can go on before the wait gets excessive."