The most likely confirmations would be derived from my work at UCLA's Institute of Transportation and Traffic Engineering and from technical projects at Thompson-Ramo-Wooldridge Products (later TRW, Inc.).  Then too, prospective sources included my students in analog and digital computers at Los Angeles Technical College.

1. Published Documentation

With limited time to devote to the softword project, I drew extensively upon the resources of the Internet.  On-line historical databases, of course, favor events that occurred long after the 1950s.  I contacted likely sources, including the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and The Software History Center, with disappointing results.

"Three moves is the same as a fire," the saying goes.  My personal archives have been eroded by seventeen residence relocations plus as many career changes.  A mere fifteen book-boxes remain.  I arranged to have them shipped from storage in Macomb, Illinois to my home in Concord, California.  I spread out their contents on my work-bench.  One item, the draft of a long-forgotten paper that I submitted to the ACM caught my attention.  I dashed into the house and gazed at my computer screen...

Sure enough, OED's earliest citation was a quote taken from Communications, Association of Computing Machinery (ACM).  I took that as an omen.  In about 1959, I had submitted a "transaction" for one of ACM's journals. My short paper described an elegant random number generator for use by a feature-challenged computer with a drum memory (that's right, a drum -- please do not laugh).  In particular, it was the RW-300, and I was using that meager machine to perform a Monte Carlo analysis of a proposed landing system for Chicago's Midway (not O'Hare -- see "Lottery Aloft").  I clicked up the ACM website, where I read...

Founded in 1947, ACM is a major force in advancing the skills of information technology professionals and students worldwide. Today, our 75,000 members and the public turn to ACM for the industry's leading Portal to Computing Literature, authoritative publications and pioneering conferences, providing leadership for the 21st century.

Among various newspaper clippings in my files dating back to the early fifties were reports of local service-club speeches, an article I wrote about UCLA's pioneering automobile crash-injury research published in California Engineer, a piece in Westways magazine reporting on the first radar speed-meter, and several formal papers. The papers were all related to traffic engineering and explicitly authored by the principal researchers for whom I worked.  None mentioned computers, let alone 'software'.

The two most relevant papers among my keepsakes were published long after 1953.  My heart skipped a beat when I found them.  The years coincided with those in the OED entry for the word 'software'.  A coincidence -- or another omen?

• "Design Considerations for Computer Driven Relay Controlled Displays," R. P. Niquette, American Institute of Electrical Engineers, June 20, 1960, 10 pp.
• "Terminal Area Sequence Control,"  R. P. Niquette, et al., a 230-page research report for the Federal Aviation Agency, February, 1961.

Worth mentioning, I think, is the fact that I did deliver earlier versions of both papers at various conferences, including one at University of Pennsylvania and another at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from within the Search Interval. From the podium and on technical panels, I distinctly remember how I allowed myself to be less formal, even jocular, yet printed in a formal paper 'software' would have looked -- well, too unserious.

So much for authenticating my claim by Published Documentation.  Just the same, any surviving attendees who recall those sessions during which they might have heard the word 'software' for the first time have been invited to comment here.  After six years, none have done so.

2. Unpublished Documentation

Back to my workbench and those fifteen boxes.

In 1953, I was a junior at UCLA.  Accordingly, the Unpublished Documentation in my archives from that period are nothing but notes and term papers on engineering subjects.  There were no courses in computers at UCLA until after I graduated in 1955.

My first necktie job put me on secret projects for Hughes Aircraft, and, apart from private maunderings and satirical cartoons, there are few unpublished documents in my unshredded personal files.  One cartoon I was hoping in vain to find would have characterized the time for readers of today.

As for lecture notes for my computer class at Los Angeles Tech -- well, there never were any.  That's right, to this day, I have always taken pride in speaking from memory, extemporizing problems, stimulating discovery.

Now, it has been a lifelong habit to mark ideas as they occur to me with a stylized lightbulb in the margin of my notebooks.  A few loose-leaf entries from the fifties include sketches so marked, which in their time were doubtless viewed as brilliant.  Over the years and in the face of technological advances, however, the embarrassing obsolescence of those early efforts all but assured that they would be discarded on residential moving days.

A few escaped, and naturally, I was hoping to find among the surviving pages a lightbulb alongside the word 'software'.   That would do it for OED, I told myself -- Unpublished Documentation from the fifties.  But no.  Whereas in my undiscarded papers, the word 'software' appears routinely in many places, usually abreviated 'S/W', the earliest occupies a line on a page dated 11/17/63 when I was at Scientific Data Systems -- beyond the Search Interval.  No lightbulb for that one.

The third and last search was about to commence...

3. Established Stories

There ought to be many of these.  All I need to do is find a few of the story tellers.  That's what I thought, anyway.  Three groups of prospective narrators are most appropriate for this last search.

3a. Family Members 1953 onwards
3b. Colleagues at UCLA 1953-1955
3c. Students at Los Angeles Tech 1956-1959

As a working full-time student with a long commute to the UCLA campus, I devoted precious few waking hours to my family.  A half-century later, there are no letters-in-the-attic to discover, either -- only a handful of greeting cards among my keepsakes, hardly the place to find Established Stories about the word 'software'.

My mother died in 1975.  In 1953, she was a single mother of three juveniles with little time to be curious about her eldest son's academic exploits.  My father died in 2002 and would have been a likely source for Established Stories about me and the word 'software'; however, he was estranged from the family for ten years beginning in 1953.

During a telephone conversation in 2001, my dad allowed that the word 'software' probably did first reach his ears from me during a television interview I gave in New York (in 1958).  He offered to sign an affidavit to that effect.  I procrastinated, thinking -- wrongly -- that there would be plenty of time for that if the need arose.

My sister, Patricia, now matriarch of our family, sent me a reply that brought tears to my eyes but no Established Stories to my search...
 

My two brothers, David and Alan, were respectively 9 and 10 years old in 1953.  Today, both are distinguished members of the clergy, David in Colorado and Alan in Oregon.  I was eager to have their replies, hoping they would include helpful contemporaneous recollections.  The closest to Established Stories, albeit from members of my family, may well be inferred from the following letters from my brothers:
 

The phrase "summer of 1957" above is possibly sufficient for the editors of OED to establish my claim at least for usage prior to 1958 -- a date that has actually become more significant than the 1953 date for the coinage, as will be seen.  Adding gravitas to that supposition are a few encouraging comments I have received from long-time friends and working associates, especially this one from Al Bongarzone:
 

3b. Colleagues at UCLA...
...fellow students and university staff -- they were all right there in 1953, present and in their adulthood for the historic moment of coinage and first usages of the word 'software'.

Over the years, I have maintained contact with only one fellow engineering student, Don Lauria.  He reminded me that he had no interest in "giant brains" during the early fifties.   Decades later, though, Don became a computer entrepreneur, selling and applying software-intensive data processing systems for small businesses.  With regret, Don admits to having no recollection today of when or where he first encountered the word 'software'.

With some effort, I tracked down another fellow student, Angelo DeGrace.  In view of my neglect for our friendship, I was not comfortable asking him up front to ransack his recollections about the word 'software'. Later on, when I was leaving on vacation, I called him for a chat.  He was just entering his third session of chemotherapy. When I returned, Angelo DeGrace was gone.

Ten persons on the staff at UCLA in 1953 would be the most likely narrators of Established Stories...
 

• Eight have died, including my mentor Dan Gerlough and my chess partner Heinz Haber. Both would be centenarians by now.  The discovery of each obituary struck me with no small amount of sadness, as I have been forced to cope abruptly with the collective loss of the finest, most generous persons I have ever known.
• Dave McClinton, who was never a close friend, is retired in Northern California.  He responded to my e-mail queries with grumpy non-sequiturs, possibly embarrassed to be asked to test his memory.
• Slade Hulbert, one of the founders of Human Factors Engineering, is now retired in nearby Danville, California and a confirmed Luddite.  I eagerly arranged a reunion.  Over wine and cheese, our conversation was dominated by his geriatric ailments.  I commenced to reminisce with Slade about the software I wrote for his projects, but he interrupted me.  "I once tried to program the SWAC myself, Paul.  I decided I hate computers."  I left a self-addressed stamped envelope for Slade's convenience.  That was more than five years ago.

Foremost, there were four students in one class who were all from TRWP (now TRW).  They pulled their neckties loose and sat together in the front row taking copious notes...

1. It was easy for me to tell that Ray Jacobsen was the boss of that group ("I'll go bring the car around, Mr. Jacobsen," said one after class each evening).  Ray was a division vice president at TRWP and hired me during that semester ("assuring myself of a passing grade," he would joke for years thereafter).  He went on later to found Anderson-Jacobsen, the leading modem manufacturer for its time.  Ray would be well into his eighties by now, which may explain why I have not been able to locate him.
2. The next student in the hierarchy was Lou Perillo, sales manager at TRWP.  Enjoying a distinguished career, he continued as a colleague and friend through most of my years at Xerox.  Lou died back in the seventies.
3. Then there is Rigdon Currie, who became a close friend.  He has continued to work with me on various business deals off and on for four decades.  A birdwatcher of some renown, Rig is now retired in Point Reyes and pleads senility whenever I mention the word 'software'.
4. Finally, there is the exceptionally talented storyteller, Ray Stanish -- my best hope for a first-hand collection of Established Stories!  Please note the exclamation point.  After all, Ray made a lucrative career out of comic impressions of Einstein and popularizing computers in hilarious speeches all over the country, retiring at the age of 32.

An "adventure" that started out as a casual investigation ostensibly on behalf of my progeny had been fraught with set-backs and disappointments and now was becoming an ego-driven obsession. Forget October, 1953.  Anything before 1960 -- OED's earliest citation -- will do.  I took a deep breath and decided to launch an all out search-and-query mission targeting my other colleagues at TRW.  I ransacked my memory and files and came up with thirty names from 1957...
 

Tracking them down one by one in a crescendo of correspondence and follow-ups, I encountered more obituaries and more memory lapses.  Still, there was no turning back from my efforts to harvest pre-1960 Established Stories. I continued writing and calling and asking.

Suddenly the endeavor lost its meaning!