History of Software Engineering

Making history

Back at the 50´s computers were made to make just one set of computations, machines like the ENIAC was  only capable of computing mathematical or business problems, also, they needed a lot of hardware and personel to work. If i want to do both computations, what then? You had to buy two computers, asign them a big room and hire a lot of people. Computers were expenseive and thats why scientist started thinking about a computer that can assign a different set of instructions in the memory and change them as the user please. Thats how software was created and with it the two first software oriented languages came, FORTRAN and COBOL. The term of Software Engineering was first used in a letter from the ACM president  Anthony Oettinger in 1965.

Software crisis

Due to repentine change to a hardware focused market to a software focused market, employees had difficulties at acomplishing the tasks. They were not prepared to build software. Thats why a conference was convened in 1968 to find a solution to the problem. They realized that processes and better tools were needed to develop better software. Here is where Software Engineering finds its roots.

Internet Empire

In 1989 the web was born when Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist at CERN in Switzerland, wrote a paper describing linking documents together with "hypertext". But it wasn't until the mid-1990's that the web browser was created to give users graphical access to those pages and the ensuing browser wars over its dominance occurred.  Now thanks to the internet a lot more people can access information, communicate and create software faster than anytime in history.

Now i´m gonna leave you with a summary of the highlights in software history, this list is not made by me but i it would be useful for you and me because we it helps you to see the big picture of the greatest events in short words.

A Timeline of Milestones:

(Taken from this page)


As usual, here is a music video for you to enjoy:


(the music starts at 3:50)

source:
https://www.vikingcodeschool.com/software-engineering-basics/a-brief-history-of-software-engineering
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_software_engineering
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering#History