ABSTRACT
At the start of the computer age, all of the engineering tasks
involving computing technology focused on hardware: the
design and debugging of electronic circuits, the organiza-
tion of logical devices, the machinery of printers, disk
drives and other elements, and the operation of compli-
cated systems. Programmers began to develop an engineer-
ing discipline for software only as they began to appreciate
the problems of describing, coding, and delivering soft-
ware systems.
