Issues in the history of computing

ABSTRACT

It should be easy to do the history of computing. After all, computing began less than 50 years ago, and we have crowds of eye witnesses, mountains of documents, storerooms of original equipment, and the computer itself to process all the information those sources generate. What's so hard? What are we missing?

REFERENCES

• 1: {Abbot, 1988} Abbott, Andrew, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
• 2: Charles J. Bashe , Lyle R. Johnson , John H. Palmer , Emerson W. Pugh, IBM's early computers, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1986
• 3: {Berkeley, 1962} Berkeley, Edmund C., The Computer Revolution, Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1962.
• 4: {Boehm, 1973} Boehm, Barry W., Software and its impact: A quantitative assessment, Datamation Vol. 19, May 1973, pp. 48--59.
• 5: {Ferguson, 1979} Ferguson, Eugene S., The mind's eye: Nonverbal thought in technology, Science Vol. 197, 1979, pp. 827--836.
• 6: Kenneth Flamm, Creating the computer: government, industry, and high technology, The Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, 1988
• 7: {Ford, 1924} Ford, Henry, My Life and Work, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1922.
• 8: {Hamming, 1980} Hamming, Richard W., We would know what they thought when they did it, in N. Metropolis, J. Howlett, G. C. Rota eds., A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century: A Collection of Essays. NY: Academic Press, 1980, pp. 3--9
• 9: {HBR, 1953a} Herrmann, Cyril C., and Magee, John F., 'Operations research' for management, Harvard Business Review, Vol. 31, No. 4, 1953, pp. 100--12.
• 10: {HBR, 1953b} First advertisement for IBM and Univac in Harvard Business Review, Vol. 31, No. 5--6, 1953.
• 11: Grace Murray Hopper, The education of a computer, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, v.9 n.3-4, p.271-281, Jan. 1988 [doi>10.1109/MAHC.1987.10032]
• 12: {Hopper, 1962} Hopper, Grace, Business data processing---a review, IFIP, Vol. 62, pp. 35--39.
• 13: Alan C. Kay, The early history of Smalltalk, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.28 n.3, p.69-95, March 1993
• 14: Brian W. Kernighan , P. J. Plauger, The Elements of Programming Style, McGraw-Hill, Inc., New York, NY, 1982
• 15: Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine, Little, Brown & Co. Inc., Boston, MA, 1981
• 16: {Kuhn, 1962} Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.
• 17: {Lynd, 1929} Lynd, Robert S., and Lynd, Helen Merrell, Middletown: A Study in American Culture, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1929; repr. 1956.
• 18: Michael S. Mahoney, The History of Computing in the History of Technology, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, v.10 n.2, p.113-125, April 1988 [doi>10.1109/MAHC.1988.10011]
• 19: {McIlroy, 1976} McIlroy, M. D., On mass-produced software components, in Software Engineering: Concepts and Techniques. Proceedings of the NATO Conferences, Peter Naur, Brian Randall, J. N. Buxton, Eds., {Garmisch, 1968; Rome, 1969)}. New York: Petrocelli/Charter, 1976, pp. 88--95.
• 20: {Norberg, 1992} Norberg, Arthur L., and O'Neill, Judy E., Promoting technological innovation: The Information Processing Techniques Office of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a report to the Software and Intelligent Systems Technology Office, DARPA. Minneapolis: The Charles Babbage Institute, 1992.
• 21: Alan J. Perlis, The American side of the development of Algol, The first ACM SIGPLAN conference on History of programming languages, p.3-14, June 01-03, 1978, Los Angeles, CA [doi>10.1145/960118.808369]
• 22: {Price, 1963} Price, Derek J. deSolla, Little Science, Big Science. New York: Columbia University Press, 1963.
• 23: Mary Shaw, Prospects for an Engineering Discipline of Software, IEEE Software, v.7 n.6, p.15-24, November 1990 [doi>10.1109/52.60586]
• 24: Bjarne Stroustrup, A history of C++: 1979–1991, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.28 n.3, p.271-297, March 1993
• 25: {Wallace, 1978} Wallace, Anthony F. C., Thinking About Machinery, in The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution, Rockdale, N.Y.: Knopf, 1978), pp. 237ff.
• 26: {Wegner, 1984} Wegner, Peter, Capital-intensive software technology, IEEE Software, Vol. 1, No. 3, 1984, pp. 7--45.
• 27: G. M. Weinberg, The psychology of computer programming, Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., New York, NY, 1988

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.0 General

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.1 MODELS AND PRINCIPLES
      H.1.2 User/Machine Systems
          Subjects: Human factors

  K. Computing Milieux
  K.2 HISTORY OF COMPUTING
      Subjects: Software
  K.7 THE COMPUTING PROFESSION
      K.7.2 Organizations

          Nouns: ACM

General Terms:
Documentation, Human Factors, Languages, Theory