Vital Statistics

Title In the Beginning: Recollections of Software Pioneers Author Robert L. Glass (Editor) Publisher IEEE Computer Society Press Los Alamitos, California http://www.computer.org/cspress/ Copyright 1998 ISBN 0-8186-7999-9 Pages 318 Price $29.00

In the Beginning

More often than not, histories of computing have either been interviews, such as Susan Lammer's Programmers at Work (Microsoft Press, 1986), or narratives, like Michael Swaine and Paul Freiberger's Fire in the Valley (Osborne/McGraw- Hill, 1984), both now out of print. With In the Beginning: Recollections of Software Pioneers, Robert Glass adds a third genre to the bookshelf -- the personal essay.

Glass, who is editor of the Journal of Systems and Software and a computer pioneer in his own right, is not so much the author of the book, as the manager. In putting together In the Beginning, Glass asked a number of other pioneers in the computing field -- David Myers, Watts Humphrey, Norman Schneidewin, Barry Boehm, Robert Britcher, Donald Reifer, Frank Land, Ben Matley, Harold Highland, Robert Babor, John Bennett, Bruce Blum, Peter Denning, and Raymond Houghton -- for their personal recollections of computing way back when (well, mainly in the 1960s). Among the issues Glass asked them to address are:

• "I did this and here is what I learned."
• "I worked with some other pioneers, such as, L,M, and N, and here is what I remember about them."
• "I was involved with project GHI, which was interesting because it pioneered PQR."
• "There was a terribly {funny} {tragic} incident that I was involved in, and here is what happened."
• "What we did back then seems strange to us today, but here is what we did and why we did it."

As you'd expect, not every essay addressed every question, but overall the authors deliver on the promise. The result is an entertaining, informative, and upfront and personal view of what computing was like when punchcards were king. In the process, we learn that "modern" concepts such as data abstraction, modularity, and structured programming have been around longer than today's software marketeers would have us expect.

That's not to say there's a dearth of technical depth to the book. Much of Barry Boehm's essay, for instance, focuses on "Rocket Trajectory Domain Architecting," providing plenty of details, ranging from interface specifications to data structures. Likewise, Peter Denning's "Before Memory was Virtual" was fascinating in its detail. Still, it is the anecdotes that makes the book shine. For instance, sitting on a panel next to Edsger Dijkstra, Donald Reifer leaned over and nervously asked the icon: "What techniques would you use to properly engineer a 100,000 source line FORTRAN program used to support a simulation application." He was shocked when Dijkstra answered, "I wouldn't have a 100,000 source line program." Reifer goes on to say that, 20 years later, he know Dijkstra was correct.

For his part, Robert Britcher points out that, in the early days before terminals were widely available, programming environments centered around terminal rooms, where programmers shared, read, and discussed source code, operating system discoveries, and the like. As terminals became more prevalent, however, "the more or less formal process of programmers reading and critiquing each other's program" became the norm. "Programmers who did not like to read texts read [source code]."

In other essays, such as Watt Humphrey's "Reflectios on a Software Life," you learn why software (air-traffic control or military control and command, for instance) still in use today was designed and written the way it was, or how IBM rose to power in the late 1950s ("How I Watched in Pain as IBM Outsmarted UNIVAC," by Norman Schneidewind). But the question remains: Can we learn from In the Beginning, or is it just a tool for winning at "Trival Pursuit"? Yes, to some degree. Certainly, the reminder that programmers should always strive to do more with less comes across loud and clear. And from a business perspective, we see many of the same mistakes being made year after year, by company after company.

Still, the real value of In the Beginning is in reminding us that, after Java hype, Windows 98 hubbubs, and World Wide Web huckerism have also found their way into the storeroom of history, new, more powerful environments and tools will find their way to us.

-- Jonathan Erickson

Table of Contents

Preface

1   INTRODUCTION

2   BEFORE THE BEGINNING: THE PRE-SOFTWARE ERA

Life Before Software, A Few Reminiscences
        David Myers

3   SETTING THE STAGE: THREE ERAS OF SOFTWARE HISTORY

Software Reflections&emdash;A Pioneer's View of the History of the Field
        Robert L. Glass

4   MAKING THE MARKET: VENDOR PIONEERS

Reflections on a Software Life
        Watts S. Humphrey

How I Watched In Pain as IBM Outsmarted UNIVAC
        Norman F. Schneidewind

5   SOLVING PROBLEMS: APPLICATION PIONEERS

Aerospace

An Early Application Generator and Other Recollections
        Barry Boehm

View From Below
        Robert N. Britcher

Almost Thirty Years as a Change Agent
        Donald J. Reifer

Information Systems

Leo, the First Business Computer: A Personal Experience
        Frank Land

Compu-THEN: Before Megabytes
        Ben G. Matley

Academic Computer Centers

Four Anecdotes
        Harold Joseph Highland

Consulting

The Prolonged Metamorphosis of a Software Engineer
        Robert L. Baber

6   PURSUING PROGRESS: ACADEMIC/LABORATORY PIONEERS

Autobiographical Snippets
        John M. Bennett

Closing the Circle
        Bruce 1. Blum

Before Memory Was Virtual
        Peter J. Denning

Growing Up with Software Tools
        Raymond C. Houghton

7.  AFTER THE BEGINNING: CONCLUSIONS

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES OF THE CONTRIBUTORS

INDEX

Excerpt from "In the Beginning"
Preface by Robert L. Glass

When history passes judgment on the change-filled time in which we now live, one thing seems fairly certain -- this will be called the "computer age."

Beginning around the middle of the twentieth century, and extending far enough into the future that few of us can imagine its ending, the computer age is the period of time during which computer power has dramatically changed, and continues to change, how the world functions. Few aspects of our lives are not touched by -- and often, heavily influenced by -- computers.

Was the computer's arrival a cosmic accident, an invention whose time simply came? Did the population explosion and the resulting social complexity make the computer a necessary tool to subdue that complexity inevitable? These questions are unanswerable, of course, but interesting to ponder.

The purpose of this book is not so much to address unanswerable questions as to capture concrete realities. The computer age, as any other, was made possible by the people who built it. The reality this book captures is that of the software pioneers of the field, the people who wrote the programs that made that complicated but very dumb product called a computer perform the magic that we have come to understand so well. Software, most would agree, makes the computer hardware world go 'round. But who are the pioneers who made the software world go 'round? And what were their experiences?

The time is right for such a book. In fact, the time is probably now or never. Given that the use of software to solve the world's problems began in the 1950s, those pioneers who began their professional careers at that time -- perhaps then in their 20s -- are now well into their 60s. Many of software's early innovators have already retired from the field, and some have died. Capturing the personal recollections of these pioneers now is essential, or they will be lost forever.

But is that enough of a reason for anyone to be interested in reading this book? Could not such a book simply be a compilation of dry-as-dust information written by old fogies who are out of touch with today and can only vaguely recall those past days?

There are several important reasons why I believe this material is worth reading:

1. Professionals in our field are surprisingly misinformed about its history. As the editor of a professional journal, I frequently see papers cross my desk that describe computing's past as prologue to some new idea they are presenting -- and they get that past totally wrong. It is time to record the truth of that prologue, if only to enable tomorrow's professionals to build more solidly on the realities of the past. 
2. The old truism "everything old is new again" is just as true in computing as it is in other fields, especially in software. The stories in this book clearly show us that such modern concepts as data abstraction, modularity, and structured approaches date much earlier in the field than their appearance in the academic literature. In many fields of endeavor, practice often precedes theory (for example, the steam engine and human flight predated the theories of thermodynamics and aerodynamics), and the software field is no exception. These stories help to capture the field's true evolution.
3. Written history has a tendency to be cold and austere, full of too many dates and "major" events and too few human experiences and true turning points. In this book, we capture those human experiences and clues to those turning points through the personal recollections of those who lived them. This book is as alive as the people whose stories it contains.

There you have it. If you have read this far, perhaps your curiosity has at least been piqued by what we are trying to do here. So let me step aside and let you read on.

Welcome to the world of computing's past!

Robert L. Glass
At the end of the twentieth century

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