We will give a short historical overview, mentioning the main general purpose packages, and emphasizing the present state of the art. Niche players and special purpose software will be largely ignored. There is a well-known quote from Brian Ripley [2002]: “Let’s not kid ourselves: the most widely used piece of software for statistics is Excel.” This is surely true, but it is equally true that only a tiny minority of statisticians have a degree in statistics. We have to distinguish between “statistical software” and the much wider terrain of “software for statistics”. Only the first type is of interest to us here – we will go on kidding ourselves.