The history of Software Engineering

Software engineering is the application of engineering to the design, development, implementation, testing and maintenance of software in a systematic method. It covers the knowledge in both computer science and engineering realm, so it could also be thought as a "edge discipline". From its beginnings in the 1960s, writing software has evolved into a profession concerned with how best to maximize the quality of software and of how to create it. As people pursued higher quality of working environment and system, which included "high speed, usability, testability" etc, the software needs to be renewable and able to be upgraded. Thus, software engineering plays a main role in this realm.

The origin of Software engineering can be traced back to around 1960. The word "Software engineering" was used in the lecture of Dr.Douglass T.Ross in MIT around that time. In 1968, the Nato Science Committee sponsored two lectures which were about "Software engineering and development", which greatly supported the development of Software engineering in the future.

However, during the period of 1965 to 1985, the software realm faced a crisis that influenced the software engineering a lot during that time. The software crisis was originally defined in terms of productivity, but evolved to emphasize quality. Some used the term software crisis to refer to their inability to hire enough qualified programmers. The software crisis showed some problems in the development of software. Those problems included cost and budget overrun, property damage, etc.

During 1985 to 1989, people in the software projects realm tried hard to fix those problems in the crisis, but it was not so successful. Nevertheless, after the development of Internet, the situation totally changed.

From 1990 to 1999, the Internet rapidly rose. Programmers could finish their projects at a rate never before seen by the Internet. The growth of browser usage, running on the HTML language, changed the way in which information-display and retrieval was organized. The widespread network connections led to the growth and prevention of international computer viruses on MS Windows computers, and the vast proliferation of spam e-mail became a major design issue in e-mail systems, flooding communication channels and requiring semi-automated pre-screening. Millions of computer users shows the coming of a new era.

In 21 century, software engineering has already become an essential part in computing and electronic engineering with the rapid development of Internet. And it will be developed at a even faster rate in the future.



Reference:
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_software_engineering

Picture Reference:
1. http://image.baidu.com/search/detail?ct=503316480&z=0&ipn=d&word=软件开发&step_word=&hs=0&pn=0&spn=0&di=124786773650&pi=0&rn=1&tn=baiduimagedetail&is=0%2C0&istype=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&in=&cl=2&lm=-1&st=undefined&cs=1566657118%2C2450386672&os=880228100%2C169314304&simid=3958628153%2C353214665&adpicid=0&ln=1940&fr=&fmq=1475895302940_R&fm=&ic=undefined&s=undefined&se=&sme=&tab=0&width=&height=&face=undefined&ist=&jit=&cg=&bdtype=0&oriquery=&objurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.qykh2009.com%2Fupload%2Feditor%2F1402556742741.jpg&fromurl=ippr_z2C%24qAzdH3FAzdH3Fooo_z%26e3Bqyhidaal_z%26e3Bv54AzdH3Fgjof_1jp_d89b_z%26e3Bip4s&gsm=0&rpstart=0&rpnum=0