History of software

by Patryk Kocielnik

Herman Hollerith (February 29, 1860 – November 17, 1929) was a German-American statistician, inventor, and businessman who developed an electromechanical tabulating machine for punched cards to assist in summarizing information and, later, in accounting. His invention of the punched card tabulating machine, patented in 1884, marks the beginning of the era of mechanized binary code and semiautomatic data processing systems, and his concept dominated that landscape for nearly a century.

– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Hollerith, referenced in https://jackrusher.com/strange-loop-2022/

"Propagators" -> VisiCal (first spreadsheet, from MIT)

Propagators:

  • dataflow
  • truth maintenance
  • provenance (-> explainable AI?)

Debuggability > correctness by construction (read: Debuggability is more important than correctness by construction.

Most programming is debugging.

You should be able to attach to long-running servers.

When I first entered the working world as a programmer and administrator of an "academic computing center", in the early 70s, you met men like Ray - ex-military, GI-bill educated, learned computers from the electricity on up in their mid-career, rather frequently, either as customer engineers for one of the big mainframe manufacturers (there were 7 or 8, depending on when and how you counted), or from the minicomputer upstarts who were then assaulting the mainframe world of computing with their smaller, cheaper, 12 and 16 bit newcomers. Sometimes you'd get the privilege of a lunch or dinner with one sent out "from the lab" who was actually designing and building the machines you were working on.

It's hard to explain just how new it all felt, then. But in 1973, even though we were sitting on the cusp of the single chip microprocessor and personal computer revolution, the commercial computer was less than 20 years old, and college recruiting materials might well brag that at their institution, there were not one, but two computers on campus. I remember the day the total RAM at our institution passed the megabyte mark - closer to the end, than the beginning, of the 1970s. The ability to "program" was a rare skill - even the people who taught it were still just learning it.

– "My dad's resume and skills from 1980", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33330864