Where can I buy ICs?

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.) Cox's attempt did not succeed because of the most obvious, yet fundamental, difference between silicon and software ICs. The former are made of atoms, so it is possible to buy and sell them through scarcity-based economics. The latter are made of bits which don't obey the same laws, which undercuts the incentive to provide them.