Essential Guide to Computing: The Story of Information Technology, The

The Software Crisis

Programming is an incredibly challenging job, and because programs are getting bigger and more complicated, developing software will continue to be more, not less, difficult. It isn't just the size of programs that is making them harder to design; it is also the way they work. In the first few decades of computing, when programs operated in batch mode, program flow could be thought of as linear—take these instructions and these data, and work through them until you reach the end. With the advent of time sharing and the ability of the user to intervene in the program flow, a conversational mode of programming appeared. It was like batch programming except that the program flow defined some specific points at which the user ...