History of Software Engineering

For this post I decided to make an infographic because, in my opinion, that makes it easier to read this kind of information, or at least easier to organize /visualize it for me.I hope you like it. I used Canva, an online free tool I’m in love with.

I like the way this man explains the history of SE so I’ll share it with you. If you want to you can skip the first two minutes of the video, the important part starts at 2:36.

In case you want to go deeper in this topic you should also read this article.

History – Software Engineering

According to the vikingcodeschool, the 50’s were difficult to programmers. They need to create the development of the programs by hand. All these scripts were processed by machines and later on, they might check if the code was correct or not. With the time, de development of software change. The first programming language was IBM´s Fortan, released in 1957.

With the time, the Defense Department from the US released Cobol in 1962, it was used with business purposes.

Many things appear every day, maybe they aren’t new, but maybe these things are changing something. I think that nowadays software and programs are being used to transform, not to CREATE.

New things are coming, maybe not an innovative thing or product, but a productive and helpful tool.

https://www.vikingcodeschool.com/software-engineering-basics/a-brief-history-of-software-engineering

Brief history of software engineering

This is going to be a short entry, given the nature of the topic and that many of this ideas will be talked about in future articles.

It is called “engineering” because early practitioners wanted to call it “software physics,” but that term was already in use. They wanted to call it software physics because they believed that the process of producing software could be formalized with such rigor that it would be on all fours with physics. Indeed, texts from the ’80s are populated with theories, derivations, tables, graphs, equations and formulae, apparently in an attempt to appear mathematical and scientific in nature (Curran, B. 2001).

Software engineering milestones:

1960’s – Software crysis: software was developed in a poor way, mainly in languages such as Fortran and Cobol. And, as the power of hardware became better, more complex programs were required.
1980’s – OOP: the magic starts. With OOP, programmers were able to write more readable and changes-friendly code as well as GUIs.
1990’s – Internet & HTML: With this, software began being uploaded. And with this, free software was born.
Today – Cloud computing and IoT are just some of the few technologies in the 201o’s.

flickr photo by wizzer2801 https://flickr.com/photos/wizzer/5357865167 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license

Sources:

Curran, B. (October, 2001). What is Software Engineering?. Ubiquity. Read at: http://ubiquity.acm.org/article.cfm?id=763745
https://www.vikingcodeschool.com/software-engineering-basics/a-brief-history-of-software-engineering

The Software Engineering Sand Clock

Once upon a time, during the late 1950s, large computers became available to research institutions and universities, now on the hands of the public domain, their use and programming became an activity of many and a new profession was born – Software Engineering, although, it wasn’t officially called that until a NATO conference took place during the software crisis in 1968 where the difficultities and pitfalls of designing complex systems were discussed.

Programming languages were created as formal notions to replace and facilitate the complex mathematical formula based instruction code and as computing capacity and the demands grew, better programming languages, tools and automation were sought, leading to the emergence of a new discipline – Computer Science/Informatics.

In 1963 the first time-sharing system appeared as a transition from batch processing and interactivity was back on the game, but this transition was a slow and complex process that brought big companies to the brink of collapse. This is when the baptizing conference of NATO took action and this difficultities were openly discussed with an unsusual frankness.

Between 1965 and 1966, academics such as Dijkstra and Hoare wrote about data structuring and harmonious cooperating processes. Their ideas had a profound influence on new programming languages, known as structured.

Difficultities were still far from dispelling, so a conference was convened in 1968 to find a solution. They produced a report that defined the foundations of software enineering, based on the best practices of project management and production already used in traditional engineering disciplines.

Dijkstra’s structured programming, declaring programming as a discipline in contrast to a craft. They appear to have succumbed to the trendy yearning for continual innovation, and to have lost sight of the need for careful craftsmanship. enable us to create artefacts that we can show and be proud of.

Software Engineering History

On the 50´s there were few computers,

And even fewer software engineers.

Programs were used by science researchers

And it remained like this for various years.

Programs were only written in Fortran.

Ten years later, Cobol was created

And that’s how business software began.

For software engineers they awaited,

As programming is a difficult task,

And learning the tricks was hard to bask.

–

And thus it began the “Software Crisis”.

Helpful resources were never enough.

It was a disease without the lyses.

Until they gathered to give it a though.

Engineering principles were applied

To what was thought as just a craft.

They also created a guide

Suggesting the creation of a draft.

Software was made collaborative

Which made it even more creative.

–

Mini computers worked with Unix

Which was easily programmed with C.

For which they were bought in large units

But the real progress was nowhere to see.

C was creating a huge problem

And it was hard to solve for them.

–

It was ninety-seventy-five

When microcomputers became cheap.

New languages started to arrive

And technology took a big leap.

Ken Bowles built a text editor,

File system ad debugger for Pascal.

Soon enough he became a creditor;

For fifty dollars he sold them all.

Object-oriented programming

Was created to avoid the jamming.

–

Tim Berners-Lee wrote a document

Describing archives linked

By hypertext and became opulent.

As the internet was created.

It was not until the nineteen-ninety,

That web browsers were created.

Software creation became free

And did not need to be licensed.

Smartphones and tables became appealing

And the word “cloud” got a whole new meaning.

References:

Viking Code School Prep. (2016). A Brief History of Software Engineering. August 8th, 2016, de The Viking Blog Sitio web: https://www.vikingcodeschool.com/software-engineering-basics/a-brief-history-of-software-engineering

Wirth,

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History of software engineering

From its beginnings in the 1960s, writing software has evolved into a profession concerned with how best to maximize the quality of software and of how to create it.

How best to create high quality software is a separate and controversial problem covering software design principles, so-called “best practices” for writing code, as well as broader management issues such as optimal team size, process, how best to deliver software on time and as quickly as possible, work-place “culture”, hiring practices, and so forth. All this falls under the broad rubric of software engineering.

You’ve probably heard of the first widely used programming language — IBM’s Fortran — which was released in 1957 for mathematical and scientific computing. Another, Cobol, was released by the US Department of Defense in 1962 for use in business applications.

Over the following decades, the discipline of programming saw a familiar tension between the scientific thinking of academia, which tended to seek idealized solutions to engineering challenges, and the practical needs of an industry faced with real-life time and cost pressures (and bloated code bases). The early 70’s saw the emergence of key ideas in systems thinking which allowed engineers to break these giant projects into modular (and much more manageable) pieces that communicated via interfaces.

Software Engineering Historayyy lmao

Back in the good ol’ days where I wasn’t born and maybe you weren´t either, I’m talking about the 50’s and 60’s, software was delivered by hand and tested for a few hours before they could have the results back. The first widely used programming language was Fortran by your holyness IBM in 1957, along with Cobol, released by the US Department of Defense in 1962. But the processes of making software were still very slow and people accepted that they didn’t have the best methods, which led to something they called a Software Crisis, so in 1968 a conference was organized to find better ways of doing programming magic. At this conference is were the roots of Software Engineering were finally established.

Over the following decades, the discipline of programming saw a familiar tension between the scientific field, who gave the ideas of how to solve engineering challenges, and the crafty men that solved the practical needs of an industry faced with real-life time and cost pressures. Over the time more ideas came around, at the 80’s Object Oriented Programming came up as well as the use of GUIs to make interaction with the machine easier.

The next years leading up to these days the computing power of the machines programmers used was increased significantly, but many don’t see this as a good thing, because before you had to write code as efficiently as possible with the little things you had, and now with so much capacity and memory, the quality of code has been downgrading leading up to wasteful software. Even if this phenomenon is true, recent years have been when there has been such an incredible development in the software industries, with the introduction of the Cloud, APIs and almost every industry realizing that they needed online presence

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History of Software Engineering…

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

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 Continue reading →

History of Software Engineering