The World's First Software Engineer

July 8, 2008 1:16 PM

The World's First Software Engineer David Caminer, the System designer behind LEO, the world's first business computer, has died, aged 92. He was a true pioneer, inventing many of the standards now called systems engineering.

He failed to get into Cambridge and said later that "university seemed an irrelevance in the days of mass unemployment and hunger marches." He became a management trainee at Lyons - a catering company in London - where he was responsible for creating the world's first business application of computing on a system called LEO and the standards that were later formalized as software engineering. "Americans can’t believe this,” Paul Ceruzzi, a historian of computing and curator at the National Air and Space Museum, said in an interview last week. “They think you’re making it up. It really was true.”

posted by Susurration (29 comments total)

EOT
posted by yort at 1:21 PM on July 8, 2008

0x2E
posted by CynicalKnight at 1:42 PM on July 8, 2008

main() {
printf("hello, underworld");
}
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 1:50 PM on July 8, 2008 [2 favorites]

static void Main(string[] args){
    Console.WriteLine("Goodbye, World");
}
posted by boo_radley at 2:16 PM on July 8, 2008 [1 favorite]

print(".")
posted by signal at 2:27 PM on July 8, 2008

Response.End();
posted by Afroblanco at 2:29 PM on July 8, 2008

.
posted by aerotive at 2:38 PM on July 8, 2008

U+2024
posted by swapspace at 2:47 PM on July 8, 2008

He wasn't the first software engineer. The article never said he was. It doesn't even use the word "software" anywhere.

Bad poster. No cookie.

The first software engineer is widely recognized to have been Augusta Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace.
posted by Captain Ligntning at 3:06 PM on July 8, 2008

puts "."
posted by Skorgu at 3:06 PM on July 8, 2008

00101110
posted by ZenMasterThis at 3:20 PM on July 8, 2008

SYSTEM ABEND
posted by quonsar at 3:42 PM on July 8, 2008

*mercury flows to zero*
posted by BrotherCaine at 3:46 PM on July 8, 2008

return INFINITY / 0;
posted by The Power Nap at 5:12 PM on July 8, 2008

00000000


It's Raining Florence Henderson writes "main()"

main returns int, goddammit.
posted by orthogonality at 5:19 PM on July 8, 2008 [1 favorite]

100 END

The first software engineer is widely, but incorrectly, recognized to have been Augusta Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace

FTFY. She didn't actually write any programs or understand that much, according to the history of Babbage I read last year.
posted by DU at 6:04 PM on July 8, 2008

DUde, you need to study more. Her contributions are widely recognized, especially given that she wrote a workable program for Bernoulli calculations. You want to disagree? That's your right. But you'd be wrong.
posted by Captain Ligntning at 6:39 PM on July 8, 2008

re: Ada Lovelace. I heard a lecture given by the guy who re-created Babbage's Difference Engine. He did a lot of research from original sources while building the machine and said that Ada's contributions have been wildly overblown by some, she did recognize and write about one very significant thing that no one else had observed. That computers were not merely manipulators of numbers, but that any symbol, from letters to words to images, could be represented and manipulated by machines.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 6:43 PM on July 8, 2008 [1 favorite]

I heard overblown as well, but I'd very much like to be proven wrong. Even the most charitable description has a single algorithm. At best that's a single "contribution" and would make her the first vaporware programmer, not software engineer.
posted by DU at 6:52 PM on July 8, 2008

Detailed discussion [BBC audio] on Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage's contributions to computation. (Executive summary: they made major advances which were entirely forgotten and had no influence on subsequent computer design or theory).
posted by GeorgeBickham at 7:38 PM on July 8, 2008

Captain Lightning, you need to distinguish between a software engineer and a programmer. I would be one of the first to fight Ada Lovelace's corner re being the first programmer. Software engineering on the other hand is a discipline. David Caminer created the first set of software process standards and defined programming conventions that were adopted by the British Computer Society. These led to the creation of Software Engineering as a discipline.
posted by Susurration at 8:13 PM on July 8, 2008

they made major advances which were entirely forgotten and had no influence on subsequent computer design or theory

That is to say entirely forgotten and having no influence on subsequent design theory
until now. It's a little like saying Aristotle was entirely forgotten and had no influence on subsequent development of Europe.
posted by humanfont at 9:33 PM on July 8, 2008

humanfont: point. I should have said "have had no influence."
posted by GeorgeBickham at 9:47 PM on July 8, 2008

DU, using a trivial Wikipedia article is not research, nor is that article remotely complete. Do more research.

Susurration, as a professional software and systems engineer of 30 years experience, I'm well aware of the differences. I've read all of the Babbage and Lovelace papers. Have you? If so, I'd love to discuss them in detail with you. If not, then you're not well equipped to argue with anyone.
posted by Captain Ligntning at 10:14 PM on July 8, 2008

main() {
printf("helleo, world");
}
posted by tellurian at 11:51 PM on July 8, 2008

Busted link (new name) is here.
posted by tellurian at 11:57 PM on July 8, 2008

Captain Lightning, sounds like we have more in common than I thought ... :-) But I still beg to differ. Suffice it to say that, as well as being a practitioner myself, I have researched the topic in (probably) as much detail as you -- and I believe that David Caminer's contribution was different - and more significant to the discipline of SE, which is about roles and processes. Whereas Ada's contribution was more significant to data processing, which is about algorithms and mathematical relationships. Without the latter, we could not write programs. Without the former, we could not develop business applications of programs.
posted by Susurration at 10:40 AM on July 9, 2008 [1 favorite]

Wow - thanks tellurian, for the LEO link! I knew this one existed, but I could not find it for my original post. This stuff is really, really fascinating!
posted by Susurration at 10:42 AM on July 9, 2008

If the LEO computer could be made operational again, would there be any regulations prohibiting it because of the mercury?
posted by BrotherCaine at 3:50 PM on July 9, 2008