CHM Live | The History (and the Future) of Software

Grady Booch explores the evolution of software from human computers to the modern era, highlighting key historical milestones.

[Recorded April 29th, 2016] Computing hardware resides in the physical world: we can see these artifacts, touch them, move them, study them. The software that brings life to that hardware lives in an ethereal world, largely hidden from observation. And yet, the story of software is just as compelling as that of hardware: both worlds are filled with stories of ambition, invention, creativity, vision, avarice, and serendipity. Just as we can identify clear eras in the evolution of computing hardware, so too can we name the epochs of software. In this lecture, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center's Grady Booch will take audiences on a journey that explores the evolution of software, from the time when computers were human to the present, where we live in a veritable sea of software. Along the way, Booch will look at historically interesting examples of software and study the evolution of the process and the tools of software development. Even now, the nature of software and software development is under rapid transformation, so Booch will conclude with some observations about the future of software.