Finding a History for Software Engineering

Historians and software engineers are both looking for a history for software engineering. For historians, it is a matter of finding a point of perspective from which to view an enterprise that is still in the process of defining itself. For software engineers, it is the question of finding a usable past, as they have sought to ground their vision of the enterprise on historical models taken from science, engineering, industry, and the professions. The article examines some of those models and their application to software engineering.