In the early days of programming, when machines were hard-wired and every byte of storage was precious, subroutines were invented to conserve memory. Their function was to allow programmers to execute code segments more than once, and under different (parameterized) circumstances, without having to duplicate that code in each physical location where it was needed. Software reuse was born. However, this was a different breed of reuse than we know today: This was reuse to serve the machine, to conserve mechanical resources. Reuse to save human resources was yet to come.

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