Art Essays - Software, WordStar, Computing, Operating System, CPM

Art Essays - Software, WordStar, Computing, Operating System, CPM Art account for 90% of what I use regularly, the differences are miniscule between the current version of Microsoft Word that I use today under Windows and the Wordstar program I used in 1980 running on CP/M. There has been little increase in basic abilities or performance from the user perspective. In fact, todays application leviathans often take as much time to launch from our ultra-fast hard drives as those lean but effective programs of yesteryear loaded from pitifully slow 8-inch floppy disks. Ironically, even as hardware has become increasingly reliable and dependable, software has become far less so. It has been years since Ive had to deal with a disk crash, yet hardly a day passes without the operating system and application software conspiring to crash one or more of the machines in my office. A six-year-old machine that serves as our firewall sits with its disk spinning away 24/7 for years with nary a glitch, yet Windows goes brain-dead if it is not rebooted at least once a week. We have been peppered for decades with claims about the accelerating pace of change, yet many of the processes that shape the practices in computer science and software engineering grind glacially slow. Today, for instance, the core software engineering concepts of coupling and cohesion are cited in nearly every basic text and are taught in colleges and universities around the world, yet it took nearly a decade to get anything published in an academically respectable journal and another decade before significant academic adoptions occurred. Ultimately, the true pace of change is not dictated by the evolution of science or technology or of ideas, but by the capacities of humans and human social systems to accommodate change. A product, a service, a practice, or a perspective however new and innovativecan have no impact without acceptance; no significance without change in people and their institutions. Hiding in Hardware The true problem with software is hardware. We have been seduced by the promise of more and more and have become entranced under the spell of Moores Law. Continued progress in hardware is not a friend, but our nemesis. We have been shielded by hardware advances from confronting our own incompetence as software professionals and our immaturity as an engineering profession. Contemporary programmers will point to the operating systems and protest that programming environments today are enormously more complex than those of yesteryear, but the real problem is in how we deal with this situation, in the discipline or its lackthrough which we attempt to overcome complexity. Some years ago when one of the then-leading computing companies surveyed its own internal software engineering practices, the most mature, systematic, and disciplined programming processes were found among application programmers producing business software for internal consumption. Next in line were those creating engineering applications. On down the line and rock-bottom last were the so-called professionals writing the core operating system and its utilities. Where discipline counted for the most, it was least evident. The story has changed little today. Our profes