1970 to 1979: Computers and Software Begin Creating Wealth - The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering - page 152

Of the computer and software companies cited in this chapter, four grew to be-
come among the largest and wealthiest companies on the planet: Apple, Microsoft,
Oracle, and SAP.
A number of the entrepreneurs who started these companies also became vastly
wealthy, with Bill Gates being the world's wealthiest man for several years. Oth-
er entrepreneurs such as Paul Allen, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, and Larry Ellison
also became personally wealthy, as did Charles Wang, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin,
Terry Ragon, and quite a few others.
Other leaders from this decade published scores of topics that transformed soft-
ware development from an unstructured cowboy style to a more predictable struc-
tured style. Some of the authors whose work was influential include Fred Brooks,
Gerald Weinberg, Ed Yourdon, James Martin, Carma McClure, and Larry Con-
stantine.
The computer and software industries have been attractive for entrepreneurs in
part because these industries have created many of the more recent billionaires and
hundreds of millionaires. In a comparatively short time span, the computer and
software industries have created enormous wealth and made permanent changes in
business and government operations and even in our personal lives.
The Troublesome Growth of Software Applications
As software became more pervasive during the 1970s, applications became larger
and more complex. This led to pioneering studies in improving software engineer-
ing. It also led to the publication of two landmark topics, among the most fam-
ous software topics to date: The Psychology of Computer Programming by Ger-
ald Weinberg in 1971 and The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick Brooks in 1975.
Both authors were colleagues at IBM, which was a hotbed of software engineering
research during this decade.
Other notable topics from this decade include The Art of Software Testing by
Glenford Myers in 1979 and Structured Design by Edward Yourdon and Larry
Constantine, also in 1979.
As it happens, my first book, Program Quality and Programmer Productivity ,
was published in 1977. In those days, the term “software engineering” was not yet
widely used and those of us who built software were still just called programmers.
As can be seen from the topic titles and publication dates, software began to
be studied as a technical discipline that needed formal methodologies in place of
cowboy programming using random techniques. These topics were written in re-