As part of writing my first book, I put together a point-form history of parallel computing. Several people subsequently told me how useful it was in helping them understand the context of papers they were reading (and one guy republished it on the web under his own name, but that’s another story). A recent blog post by Matt Heusser containing notes toward a history of software testing has got me thinking that I’d really like to have something similar for both research and practice in software engineering. Kind of strapped for time right now, but I’m willing to get the ball rolling:
- 1947: first bug found (by Grace Hopper, in the Aiken Mark II).
- 1968: first use of the term in the title of the NATO Software Engineering Conference.
- 1975: first publication of Brooks’ The Mythical Man-Month.
- 2000: world doesn’t end.
What would you add?
Later: should have been more specific—if you’d like to suggest an addition, please provide the year and a Twitter-sized description of the event / invention / product / publication / discovery. “OOP should be on your list!” or “Everyone should read XYZ!” aren’t history…
Hi Greg,
I recently read Thomas Edison’s biography, which was written in the 1950′s. I found it interesting that several times the word “bug” was used to describe problems in the “systems” he was creating. I had always heard that the word “bug” originated with Grace Hopper as being actual bugs. But it appears to me that this word had been used for decades before this. Hopper’s experience may just be the first instance that an insect was the real culprit. Anyway, just a tidbit.
1936: Turing publishes “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem”.
1951: First PhD in Computer Science awarded to David Wheeler.
How can someone have gotten a PhD in Computer Science in 1951 when, according to the ACM historians, the term “computer science” was first applied to our discipline in 1959 by Alan Perlis when he needed a name for what the historians assert was the fitst degree program in the field?
Any details on David Wheeler? Where he got his degree? What his thesis was about?
If you go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Diploma_in_Computer_Science and then to Wheeler’s wikipedia page, you’ll see that he got a diploma for a one-year course, not a PhD, and that the diploma didn’t have “computer science” in its name until much later.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Wheeler_(computer_scientist) has more details. It was all part of the University Mathematical Laboratory at the time, but EDSAC was the core of the thesis.
I found the thesis details at
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=612745
[48] D.J. Wheeler, “Automatic Computing With EDSAC,” PhD thesis, Univ. of Cambridge, August 1951.
If you search on “1951″ and Computer Science at http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu
you get two hits. There are a few other firsts listed here: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/conference/EDSAC99/statistics.html
My guess is that Alan Perlis came up with the name “Computer Science”, but it wasn’t the first degree program in the field.
Hi Greg,
M.S. Mahoney of Princeton has written a great article on this entitled “The Roots of Software Engineering”. I highly recommend it!
http://www.princeton.edu/~mike/articles/sweroots/sweroots.pdf