From 03cd610312d147319a77e3cd56a8518f9c9b82fe Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Andy Ko Date: Thu, 15 Jun 2017 10:38:01 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] Mentioned hidden figures. --- history.html | 5 +---- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 4 deletions(-) diff --git a/history.html b/history.html index 4de0645..b20d35e 100644 --- a/history.html +++ b/history.html @@ -15,22 +15,19 @@ - The history of software engineering

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A brief history of software engineering

Andrew J. Ko
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Computers haven't been around for long. If you read one of the many histories of computing and information, such as James Gleick's The Information, or Jonathan Grudin's History of HCI, you'll learn that before digital computers, computers were people, calculating things manually. And that after 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—it was reserved for the few that could afford and maintain a room-sized machine.

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Computers haven't been around for long. If you read one of the many histories of computing and information, such as James Gleick's The Information, or Jonathan Grudin's History of HCI, you'll learn that before digital computers, computers were people, calculating things manually, as portrayed in the film Hidden Figures (watch it if you haven't!). And that after 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—it was reserved for the few that could afford and maintain a room-sized machine.

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.