Introduction

Abstract

The stimulus for this conference came from a recognition that the historical software literature focuses too narrowly on a few technical developments and not enough on the wider range of issues in areas such as software development, application, processes, and people. In one perspective, the history of software is now about at the stage that hardware history was 15 years ago. Writers on computing history over the past two decades, both in and out of university settings, have focused primarily on hardware and firms. Entries about software topics seem to emulate articles on hardware, giving precedence to particular languages, or are set pieces about a particular application such as the United States Government’s SAGE air defense project and the Bank of America’s ERMA system, which stood for Electronic Recording Machine—Accounting, both projects of the 1950s. Within the expanding bibliography on the history of information processing, the history of software has the least number of entries. Virtually all the literature about the history of software presents reviews of the development of a particular software artifact. Articles on programming languages, operating systems, applications programming, and network protocols, to name only a few, make up the examples in this area, along with a group of essays on members of the software industry. While these articles and books are good and useful, we still have little appreciation for the overall history of software; certainly nothing similar to our history of hardware.