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Software Engineering

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  • How far back are you talking about. I have personally seen a couple minicomputers from the early 80's that had a 'datapool' (ie a global variable listing) containing in excess of 60K labels. Commented Oct 24, 2012 at 0:18
  • -1: In the early days you not only paid a monthly rental to have access to a computer, you paid for CPU cycles and memory used by you program. Software was far from free, and running the software even less so. Commented Oct 24, 2012 at 2:36
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    @mattnz: Back some time ago, software was often bundled, which is somewhat different from free. Typically, an enterprise that needed a computer would buy or rent one, and not pay for running the machine, although individual users would often be charged for that. I'm also puzzled by the OP's claim that people weren't expected to write their own software, because that certainly wasn't my experience. If you could afford a computer, you could afford a development staff, and there really wasn't much canned software out there. Commented Oct 24, 2012 at 16:51
  • The problems with single-scope programming were recognized quite early, long before computers had multiple megabytes of memory. ALGOL, the first language with lexical scope, appeared in 1958. Commented Oct 25, 2012 at 16:31