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

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.

Comments

Not Sure How I feel about this

[zifn4b]

I'm curious how other software engineers feel about this. I mean, I started on a Commodore 64 as a kid and later went on to architect highly scalable enterprise systems but for some reason I don't feel like we need a museum to honor the people who practice our trade. I feel like we should recognize the amazing feats we accomplished with our passion, ingenuity and persistence and inspire others with them. I'm no hero. I'm just a master of a craft and in performing my craft I try to make the world a better place with it.

Also, I doubt the creators of World of Warcraft would consider themselves heroes. World of Warcraft was just an epic feat in creating a time waster. Don't get me wrong, it was a feat of software engineering but it didn't really add much value to the world. There are far better examples of software systems that did really make a difference in the world. For example, we should be honoring DARPA for creating the very technology that Slashdot broadcasts its information on and we have these discussions on. Disney's Spaceship Earth had a futuristic vision of Earth sponsored by AT&T that we would have a global communication network where we could video conference each other around the world. Guess what? We've arrived at the future vision. That's something to stand in sheer awe of, not World of Warcraft and Photoshop.

Re:They forgot compilers

[GuB-42]

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.