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Software Engineers Are the Heroes of New Computer History Museum Exhibit (ieee.org)

Posted by BeauHD on from the changing-the-world dept.

Tekla Perry writes: The Computer History Museum set out to turn the spotlight on software engineers and show how they are the changing the world. But what projects to feature in the new, permanent exhibit [called "Make Software: Change the World!"] (that opens to the public this Saturday, January 28th)? The curators whittled a list of 100 technologies that owe their existence to breakthroughs in software down to seven: Photoshop, the MP3, the MRI, car crash simulation, Wikipedia, texting, and World of Warcraft. They expect these choices to be debated at length, in particular, World of Warcraft, but hope the exhibition elevates the prominence of software engineers and gets more than a few middle schoolers talking about targeting their career plans in that direction.

3 of 115 comments (clear)

  1. They forgot compilers by Viol8 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Without these NONE of the above would have happened. Good luck programming any of them in assembler.

    1. Re:They forgot compilers by GuB-42 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I think the reason they didn't mention compilers, and OSes for that matter is that they limited themselves to things that are actually useful for the end user, not what lie behind it.
      All examples are the visible part of different kinds of underlying technologies. It is actually a pretty good list as they managed to represent a wide variety of technology with a wide variety of applications.

      The choice of World of Warcraft is a particularly good one IMHO. Video games are a major component of the history of computing and it is important to include something to represent this industry. WoW is a very successful game made by a very successful company and so, a good representative. There is also a wide array of technologies behind it. It is a realtime 3D game with all that implies in term of computer imaging and GPU development, it also has a complex network architecture behind it, with game servers, database servers, load balancing, etc... Being a paid game with a subscription, it even dips into eCommerce.

  2. What a load of crock by thegarbz · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Software that changed the world? World of Warcraft is a game, what about pageranking and crawling? Where's the search engines?

    Why is a patent encumbered music compression format on the list, did music not get shared before it? I mean the most popular online music shops don't use that format, neither does digital radio. Why MP3 and not AAC, and isn't MP3 just a succession of a previous format and one that is under constant redevelopment?

    On that list, Photoshop, MRIs and Wikipedia deserve the place. The rest should get the curators fired.