To handle the jobs, an enormous bureaucracy had grown up around the central computer center. The major problem as a result of this bureaucracy was turnaround time, the time between job submission and completion. At worst it was measured in days. Then came the IBM It signaled the beginning of the stabilizing era. This was the largest software project to date. It put an end to the era of a faster and cheaper computer emerging every year or two.
Software people could finally spend time writing new software instead of rewriting the old. The also combined scientific and business applications onto one machine. It offered both binary and decimal arithmetic. With the advent of the , the organizational separation between scientific and business application people came to diminish and this had a massive impact on the sociology of the field. Scientific programmers who usually had bachelor degrees felt superior to business programmers who usually held only associate degrees.
One scientific programmer remarked: "I don't mind working with business programmers, but I wouldn't want my daughter to marry one! The job control language JCL raised a whole new class of problems.
The programmer had to write the program in a whole new language to tell the computer and OS what to do. JCL was the least popular feature of the The demand for programmers exceeded the supply. The notion of timesharing, using terminals at which jobs could be directly submitted to queues of various kinds was beginning to emerge, meeting with some resistance from traditionalists.
This has led some to decry the rise of "wasteful" software. Source: World Science Festival. In 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's that the web browser was created to give users graphical access to those pages and the ensuing browser wars over its dominance occurred. Another important development of the 90's was the rise in open-source software. The paradigm of the day was for developers to only release the executable binaries and not the actual developer-friendly source code.
Open Source was a reaction from engineers tired of being shackled to these corporate code bases and forced to license software. The open-source movement is one of the major reasons for the latest explosion in software engineering productivity -- a significant number of the languages, tools, and frameworks that we use to develop software are only available to us because their creators decided to "open source" them.
Otherwise, you'd potentially have to pay for or at least license every bit of software you use e. Ruby on Rails. Some of the more recent-day history is probably already familiar to you. For instance, how the rise of commodity computers has led to the development of the "cloud", so now applications can be updated and accessed in real time as opposed to downloaded onto a user's computer. And then there's the rise of mobile with the development of smartphones and tablets -- Apple's iPhone wasn't the first smartphone but it helped put one in most American households.
Mobile continues to redefine the way we think about the use and reach of software. Though so far we've covered the technologies that have enabled software's explosion, much of engineering is also about implementing the right processes to solve problems. If you recall, a lack of effective processes is what originally propelled developers to adopt engineering practices back in the 's.
More recently, the rise of cloud computing and more demanding consumers have led to the rise of new project management techniques like Agile Development, which we'll cover in future lessons.
This talk by Paolo Perrotta at Baruco takes an entertaining if meandering journey through software history and how the perception of software engineers has evolved over time:. This includes everything from computer programs to libraries, as well as data that might not necessarily be executable.
Intangible as they might be, software is an incredibly vital aspect of a computer system, as a computer cannot possibly run without it as well as hardware in place.
Just like how you cannot use a computer without a monitor, it is also unrealistic for you to expect a computer running without any software in it. While in the past software was created using low-level assembly or programming language, nowadays a vast majority of it are developed and written using a programming code that is so much more similar to a natural language as we know it.
This language, also known as a high-level programming language, makes it so much easier for a programmer to write a software for consumers to use.
Although software is essential to every single computer in existence, a lot of people are unaware of its history, which is rather unfortunate as its creation practically give birth to some of the biggest STEM fields in modern history, which are computer science as well as software engineering.
It might surprise quite a few people to realize that the first set of algorithm in existence was written by a woman.
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