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Andy Ko 2017-06-15 10:38:01 -07:00
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<link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css" />
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<title>The history of software engineering</title>
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<body>
<p><a href="index.html">Back to table of contents</a></p>
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<img src="images/punchcard.jpg" class="img-responsive" />
<small>Credit: unknown</small>
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<h1>A brief history of software engineering</h1>
<div class="lead">Andrew J. Ko</div>
<p>Computers haven't been around for long. If you read one of the many histories of computing and information, such as James Gleick's <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Information-History-Theory-Flood/dp/1400096235">The Information</a>, or <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Tool-Partner-Evolution-Human-Computer-Interaction/dp/1627059636">Jonathan Grudin's History of HCI</a>, you'll learn that before <em>digital</em> computers, computers were people, calculating things manually. And that <em>after</em> digital computers, programming wasn't something that many people did. It was reserved for whoever had access to the mainframe and they wrote their programs on punchcards like the one above. Computing was in no way a ubiquitous, democratized activity&mdash;it was reserved for the few that could afford and maintain a room-sized machine.</p>
<p>Computers haven't been around for long. If you read one of the many histories of computing and information, such as James Gleick's <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Information-History-Theory-Flood/dp/1400096235">The Information</a>, or <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Tool-Partner-Evolution-Human-Computer-Interaction/dp/1627059636">Jonathan Grudin's History of HCI</a>, you'll learn that before <em>digital</em> computers, computers were people, calculating things manually, as portrayed in the film <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures">Hidden Figures</a> (watch it if you haven't!). And that <em>after</em> digital computers, programming wasn't something that many people did. It was reserved for whoever had access to the mainframe and they wrote their programs on punchcards like the one above. Computing was in no way a ubiquitous, democratized activity&mdash;it was reserved for the few that could afford and maintain a room-sized machine.</p>
<p>Because programming required such painstaking planning in machine code and computers were slow, most programs were not that complex. Their value was in calculating things faster than a person could do by hand, which meant thousands of calculations in a minute rather than one calculation in a minute. Computer programmers were not solving problems that had no solutions; they were translating existing solutions (for example, a quadratic formula) into the notation a computer understood. Their power wasn't in creating new realities or facilitating new tasks, it was accelerating old tasks.</p>