Portable Software

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What Does Portable Software Mean?

Portable software is a software program that can be run on different computers running different operating systems with no or little modifications.

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Techopedia Explains Portable Software

The Latin word “port” means to carry. Portability is the attribute of being easy to carry from one point to another or, in this case, from one operating system to another.

Typically, software is said to be portable when it is more cost efficient to exchange it between two different platforms than to write the program from scratch. Emulators are used to give more application extensibility to the software package, which allows it to run on multiple operating systems.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.