An Overview of Recent Software History?

RobotWisdom asks: "Has anyone run across (or even heard of) an up-to-date overview of the most-important new subdomains for software applications? Inspired by the popularity of my timeline of Unix/Linux, for the last few months I've been working on a new timeline of AI, simulations, and knowledge-representation in general. Digging around online for links about simulation, for example, I discovered vast areas I was completely unaware of, mostly oriented towards the US military. In another context, I started noticing the TLAs 'SCM' and 'CRM' in relation to business software, and had to trackdown what they were all about. This morning I clicked on a banner ad for 'ModelSim' and discovered the TLAs 'HDL' and 'RTL' for simulating logic-chips. Another recent news item led me to the burgeoning field of medical simulations. But what I'm not getting is any sense of an overview of all these specialized domains, that seem to have emerged in software only in the last 30 years. Are there university classes that deal with this, giving a capsule portrait of each one? Textbooks?? Webpages???"

Comments

tsarkon reports teh futare of slashcrap

[Anonymous Coward]

The Future of SLASHDOT.

2002. Slashdot publishes 1,000,000th rumor passed off as actual story. The story generates 480 comments, 263 of which agree with the article, and 107 of which point out it's a rumor and are modded down as redundant. The remaining comments are all "first posts." or posts that contain any rational insight are modded "troll."

2002. CmdrTaco married to a human female, reports are that she does not have 46 chromosomes, however. Fent does display tendency to retardation.

2002. Slashdot parent corporation VA Research^W Linux^W Software stock worth 35 cents. Rumors that AOL, Microsoft, or even Jimmy the hobo who lives under the Longfellow Bridge may buy it.

2003. VA Software bought by Microsoft for a cup of coffee and a donut. All Microsoft-critical articles mysteriously disappear from Slashdot. Bill Gates as Borg logo replaced with Bill Gates as God. (Taco suggested that in order to be "God," or his vision of God, Gates would have to be seen in a NAMBLA T-shirt. Luckily good taste prevails in favor of the old man image in glowing aura)

2004. CmdrTaco loses virginity, well, not sex with men virginity, that's long since gone, and not sex with anime blow up dolls, this time, real sex.

2004. The WIPO Troll returns again, showering Slashdot in 45,000 copies of the same post: "Lick my crotch hairs." Slashdot, despite
running on 18 redundant IIS/8.0Beta6 servers, buckles under the load. The term "Slashdotted" is replaced with "WIPO-Trolled."

2004. Slashdot officially shut down. Millions of screaming, unwashed geeks invade Redmond campus and lynch Bill Gates.

2005. Linus Torvalds and Anal Cox found dead along with six penguins, a tub of crisco and several used condoms. FreeBSD users are glad the insanity is dying.

2005. CmdrTaco rumored to have had sex again, even with constant Viagra therapy, it took this long. He complains, I can be ready to go again in five minutes if I was looking at a nude man, to the dyslexic Fent.

2006. CowboiKneel found dead in hotel room with 56 pizza boxes covering his bloated corpse. Three suffocated gay prostitutes are extracted from beneath his body as police remove it with a backhoe.

2007. CmdrTaco actually has sex again, this time plugging Fent in the ass for a more manlike feel.

2007. BSD is still officially "dying." No word on when its demise will take place. FreeBSD 9 is delivered in perfect working order in a coherent superior, commercially viable and useable fashion with real documentation, the same practice followed since inception. Linux lunatics, after the death of Cox, are still trying to perfect the Trident driver while ignoring the existence of the GeForce 9. Netcraft dies along with all the surveys they held on Microsoft and Linux servers are lost as well.

2007. CmdrTaco starts new weblog to replace Slashdot, creatively named Dotslash. Remainder of Linux users flock to the site and immediate WIPO-Troll it out of existence.

2007. Box running FreeBSD for 6 years sets world record for Unix uptime on consumer hardware.

2008. CmdrTaco has sex with his wife for the first time without thinking of men. He has dawned on the extra sexual pick me up for his twisted mind, small children.

2010 Marcelo Tosatti finally releases a version of the 2.4 Linux Kernel that is useable 2.4.29-RC2099.alpha.stage.99 (not -STABLE!). Fuck you Marcelo, YOU SUCK as a MAINTAINER.

Is genital-too, I mean Gentoo fixed yet? Last time it made me perform all these stupid, fucking easily scriptable mindless tasks to get it installed, with everything installed perfectly the stupid thing didn't work. Death to OS X, death to lame Linux distributions, I want a COHERENT Linux distribution and FREEBSD or DIE, baby.

A long long fucking time from now. Malda, fat, po