• Niklaus Wirth on the history of software engineering. Choice quote: “the development of C was a great leap backward”.
• Janet Delve on the role of memory in the history of computing. Choice quote: “too many in our field view the original works of pioneers as sacred, and therefore never to be questioned. Hence accounts of events are seldom challenged, revisited, or reinterpreted.”
• Michael Mahoney on challenges in the history of software. I would argue that software engineers actually do study the mistakes of the past, but perhaps not as systematically as one might like. As Janet Delve mentions, it’s easy to see past projects as irrelevant to current projects (this is the Not Invented Here syndrome in a nutshell). Choice quote: “As historical artifact, software is most valuable in its dynamic form. The historian gains most from seeing how the software worked and from working with it.”

There’s a good general-purpose journal: Technology and Culture, which addresses a wide array of topics. There is also the Computer History Museum’s Software Industry SIG, and the IEEE Annals of History of Computing, but that’s about it. The focus also often veers into straight-up narrative, rather than a critical look at how/why certain things evolved.

I think it’s pretty clear why history matters, “those who forget ..” etcetera etcetera. An interview I watched the other day made the case that the inventor of LINQ, Anders Hejlsberg, isn’t ‘inventing’ so much as engineering: applying to Visual Studio and .NET the ideas behind LISP, Python list comprehensions, and so on. Of course this is still creativity in action, as Steve Martin would say. Because Hejlsberg understands his history he is able to leverage it (whether because he is well-read, was there for it, brilliant, or all of the above, I don’t know).

Here is the point, however: good history is not about dates and people, the ‘what happened’ narrative aproach, but ‘why‘: why REST, why Apache took off, why Perl has faded, why WS-* is despised … As you can see, there’s a lot to look at.