Re: "Engineer"

[Richard Mateosian <srm -at- CYBERPASS -dot- NET>]

>Few of the founding fathers of software engineering were engineers.

Depends on what you mean by engineer.

Somewhere over the years my copy of the proceedings of the Garmisch
conference of Oct 68 have disappeared, but I still have the report of the
1969 Rome conference. It lists 68 participants with their affiliations.
Twelve are from IBM. Eight are from computer science departments. Six are
from math departments or math laboratories. Three are from Bell Labs.
Other
affiliations include GE, Siemens, Boeing, ICL, Control Data, UNIVAC, and
BBN.

The seven chapters of the report are

  1. Theory and practice
  2. Software specification
  3. Software quality (correctness; performance measurement and
     improvement)
  4. Software flexibility (portability; adaptability)
  5. Large systems (case histories; sources of problems; software
     support)
  6. Software engineering education
  7. Working papers
       Aron: Estimating resources for large systems
       Brown: Software portability
       Dijkstra: Structured programming
       Falkoff: Criteria for a system design language
       Gotlieb & McEwen: System evaluation tools
       Hopkins: Computer aided software design
       Lang: Languages for writing system programs
       McGowan: UNIVAC 1108 instrumentation
       Needham: Software engineering techniques & OS design and
         production
       Needham & Aron: Software engineering and computer science
       Schorr: Compiler writing techniques and problems
       Schwartz: Analyzing large scale system development
       Teitelman: Toward a programming laboratory
       Ulrich: Design of highly reliable continuous operation systems

Whatever these participants titles and affiliations may have been, they
are
clearly working on engineering problems.  ...RM

Richard Mateosian <srm -at- cyberpass -dot- net>
Review Editor, IEEE Micro                       Berkeley, CA

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