The idea that software should be componentized, built from prefabricated components, was first published in Douglas McIlroy's address at the NATO conference on software engineering in Garmisch, Germany, 1968 titled Mass Produced Software Components. This conference set out to counter the so-called software crisis. His subsequent inclusion of pipes and filters into the Unix operating system was the first implementation of an infrastructure for this idea.

The modern concept of a software component was largely defined by Brad Cox of Stepstone, who called them Software ICs and set out to create an infrastructure and market for these components by inventing the Objective-C programming language. (He summarizes this view in his book Object-Oriented Programming - An Evolutionary Approach 1986.)

IBM led the path with their System Object Model (SOM) in the early 1990s. Some claim that Microsoft paved the way for actual deployment of component software with OLE and COM. Today, many successful software component models exist.