Connections between the Software Crisis and Object-Oriented Programming

that is at the heart of the larger story of the great ‘computer revolution ’ of the mid-to-late 20th century.” 1 “The history of software is the history of how various communities of practitioners have put their portion of the world into the computer … translating their experience and understanding of the world into computational models … [which] reflect the histories of the communities that created them and cannot be understood without knowledge of those histories, which extend beyond computers and computing to encompass the full range of human activities.” 2 These two quotes, the first by Nathan Ensmenger in his upcoming book, and the second, opening his piece on “What Makes the History of Software Hard ” by the late Michael Mahoney, when taken together outline a specific approach to the history of computing: software is treated as central, not an afterthought, and social relationships, not technological artifacts, are fore-grounded. This program brings the History of Computing and of software more closely in line with