The history of Software Engineering begins in the 40’s and 50’s, where programs where just instructions to control physical devices and programmers didn’t even interact directly with computers. It was until 1957 when IBM released the first widely programming language, Fortran.
The 1960’s is known as the Software Crisis. In this decade programs failed on being reliable, good quality, on time and on a budget, therefore, people started to lose trust on the computer industry.
To solve all these problems, it was important to understand the fact that a process is required to develop good quality projects. Then, in a conference in 1968 the term “Software Engineering” was born. The purpose of that conference was to find a solution to the crisis; the results, to implement procedures and project management from other disciplines of engineering, to software.
In the 1980’s the object oriented programming started to be a trend in software engineers, which allowed programmers to develop graphic user interfaces (GUI). In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist from CERN, started to link papers with hypertext. And it was until the 1990’s that the browser was created to give users access to those papers.
Also in the 1990’s started the open-source software. This event is one of the reasons to the huge productivity that software engineering has reached since then.
In the last decade an important development was the “cloud” and software engineering has been focusing on creating apps for mobiles and tablets.
What do you think is going to be the next software innovation?
Source
- http://www.softwaretestingstuff.com/2007/09/brief-history-of-software-engineering.html
- https://www.vikingcodeschool.com/software-engineering-basics/a-brief-history-of-software-engineering
- https://ifs.host.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Books/SE9/Web/History/
