Martin Goetz, who joined the computer industry in its infancy in the mid-1950s as a programmer working on Univac mainframes and who later received the first U.S. patent for software, died on Oct. 10 at his home in Brighton, Mass.

It was major news in the industry: An article in Computerworld magazine bore the headline “First Patent Is Issued for Software, Full Implications Are Not Known.”

Robin Feldman, a professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, said by phone, “The world we live in now, with app stores and software invented in someone’s garage, is a credit to Goetz’s vision, his scientific innovation and dogged persistence.”

“I had the opportunity to tell the world why IBM’s unbundling was a godsend for the user community,” he wrote in 2002 in a two-part memoir published in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Annals of the History of Computing.

His mother, Rose (Friedman) Goetz, worked at the store and, after her husband’s death, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II.

Mr. Goetz was inducted into the Mainframe Hall of Fame, which cited him as the “father of third-party software.” In 2007, Computerworld named him an “unsung innovator” of the computer industry.

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