A little bit of history repeating...

I've been reading the new From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry by Martin Campbell-Kelly and I have been impressed with both his approach and his analysis of the subject matter. He notes the fleeting and mostly disappearing bits of computing history from even as recently as a decade ago. I have also noticed this just by the culling of bits from the Perl history project which are few, far between and often lacking a public interest in preserving for posterity. I save what I can in hopes that it may someday be useful and appreciated. Much of the book owes its research to corporate archives which aren't public but which the author was able to obtain access to.

The book stops at 1995 for various good reasons so those looking for an open source software history will have to wait, but he does mention open source in the very beginning which immediately gives him credibility as a historian with a clue:

"A second limitation of this book is the cutoff date of 1995. Naturally historians have a professional reluctance to write about very recent events on which they lack a proper perspective, so I have no fear of criticism from other historians on that score. However, any self-respecting industry analyst or software journalist would bring the story up to date and would, for good measure, project a few years into the future. This involves a set of skills different from that of the historian. It is not mere pusillanimity that makes me reluctant to attempt to do the same, but the fact that such projections are often wrong and therefore that contemporary obsessions often miss the real drama and turning points. For example, in the last 5 years there has been an enormous amount of press coverage of the Java programming language, the Linux operating system, and open-source software. I have no idea whether these will turn out to be turning points in the industry or not, and my opinion is certainly no better than the average pundit's. On the other hand, I find it quite fascinating that in the business press of the early 1990s the Internet was one of the least-written-about subjects, getting perhaps one-tenth the column inches devoted to Microsoft Windows or the tribulations of WordPerfect. I don't know what it is, but I bet there is something much more important going on right now than Java, Linux or open-source software, and that it will be 2010 before it becomes fully apparent."

The book is full of interesting little tidbits such as the Computer Usage Company [ CUC ], the first software contracting firm, was a start-up whose first four programmers were all women who were recent science or math grads. His style is a wee bit dry but that's understandable when you're working with this kind of project where there are lots of facts, big gaps in information and few personal accounts of the subject matter to give it a more human dimension. Every story in this book has a much larger story to tell, you can feel it, but people die and their story dies with them unless they have made an attempt to preserve it. Perhaps this will be a wake-up call to some whom history is important.

The author is also working on The History of Mathematical Tables: From Sumer to Spreadsheets which is due out by August and should be very interesting to read as well.

2 May 2003 at 12:37, Helsinki