History of a Technology or Specific aspect of Engineering - Research Paper Example

These factors have created a rich history and heritage regarding software engineering. What is Software Engineering? Software engineering is a process of producing programmes to provide functionalities basing on the problem being solved. The software can either be generic in which it is provided to the customers the way it is or custom in which customers can change it to suit their specifications. Software is engineered to give instructions to hardware components, for example, computers; and hand held hardware devices, for example, mobile phones and tablets to perform certain tasks.

Software needs hardware for it to be operational. The specific hardware specifications determine the type of software that will be engineered and the specifications it should have (Puntambeker 3). The Early Days of Software Engineering Software engineering was cracked in the mid twentieth century. However, all the credit goes to people who started the ideology way before the twentieth century. In 1804, French by the name Jaquard made a loom that would perform predefined tasks using punched cards that were fed on a reading contraption on the loom.

This technology was used for the production of carpets and tissue. It allowed people with no skills to use the loom to make carpets and tissue. This technology by Jaquard inspired many people to think on ways they could put instructions on the card to be replicated on the product (Robat 5). Charles Babbage designed an analytical machine which would use programmes. Although the machine never operated, Ada Lovelace wrote a rudimentary programme for the machine that was designed by Babbage in 1843.

Four years later, a British mathematician George Boole proved that there was a lot of relation between mathematics and logic. Logic was therefore mathematical and not philosophical as previously claimed by the ancient philosophers (Robat 8). These four people had an idea of how programming would work, but never went to the extent of starting it off. Their ideas proved important to the people who later on pioneered software engineering. At first, programmers and other professionals in this field could not comprehend what John Von Neumann was saying.

They analyzed his statements and looked at them logically to start getting a clear picture of exactly what he meant. Programmers and experts who understood this went ahead to make computing better. Random Access Memory was developed with the main objective of allowing easy access to any information in the computer faster. The improvements were well embraced but still, there was a lot of room for improvement, especially in the software part. The computing machines at the time were quite huge, the size of a grand piano using about 2,500 tubes (Evans, 2004).

Software engineering went a notch higher, with the plan calculus by Konrad Zuse in 1945. This was the first ever documented algorithmic programming language. The objective of Konrad was to create theoretical preconditions of solving general problems. This new development inspired many others to continue with the improvement in the quest to engineer the best software. In 1948, Claude Shannon coined out the mathematical theory of communication through which engineers were taught how to code and to check for transmission accuracy between computers.

Four years later, Grace Hopper came up with a compiler this allowed computers to use words instead of numbers. She came up with ARITH-MATIC, FLOW-MATIC and MATH-MATIC [software] basing on her A-0 compiler.