Twenty Years of Software Engineering: Looking Forward, Looking Back
The task of looking back over a period of such tumultuous activity and making a cogent statement of what happened is sufficiently challenging for this panelist; I shall make no attempt to look forward. The last twenty years have been a coming of age for the software world, and for the information industry in general. The growth and contagious enthusiasm of this period have been remarkable. Computing and software in eighties has had some of the frenetic excitement of the space industry in the sixties, war in the forties, radio in the thirties or electricity in the twenties. I cannot think of another field of endeavor which would have been more enticing during my lifetime. What is tempting today is to look back over the phenomenal growth of the last two decades and try to explain it in terms of the causative actions we took during the formative years. This might lead to statements of this form: “But for the monumental contributions of such technologists as , it is doubtful that the success of the ueriod would ever have happened at all.” In the blink you fill in the names of those you admire or, better still, the names of other panelists, while expecting those other panelists to be dutifully placing your name on their position statements. What this lacks in historical veracity, it make up for in effective self-promotion. As tempting as that may be, I find myself persuaded that the key decisions that governed progress in our industry were made from outside the industry. They were not technological at all; rather they were political. And their major effect was not to enhance the growth of the field but to restrict it drastically. I refer to the stupid and ill-considered American public policy to weaken the major participants in the industry through the use and threat of use of anti-trust legislation. Xn the climate of 1989, it is difficult to conceive of American political action whose intent and purpose was the methodical crippling of the most successful