1960s

In the 1960s, when the field of Computer Science was emerging, some practitioners wrote encyclopedic histories and organized individual programming languages chronologically. Representative works from this period include Saul Rosen’s Programming Systems and Languages (McGraw-Hill, 1967) and Jean E. Sammet’s Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals (Prentice Hall, 1969). The latter comprehensively describes the technical aspects of the development of 116 programming languages up to the mid-1960s. This work was one of the reasons for the large number of historical studies of programming languages in later years.

1970s

The 1970s were a crucial period for the development of the history of computing. During this time, museums and journals were established, and professional historians of computing emerged. Notably, the Charles Babbage Institute was founded in 1978, and the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing published its first issues in July 1979. Also, the inaugural conference on the history of programming languages took place in Los Angeles in 1978, and the first significant conference on the history of computing was held at Los Alamos in June 1979. However, the papers presented were primarily from practitioners with an interest in history. In fact, books published during this period, such as Herman H. Goldstein’s The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann (one of the earliest written overviews of the history of the computer) and The Origins of Digital Computers edited by Brian Randell, who was an advisor of M. Campbell-Kelly, were practitioner-oriented.

1980s

During the 1980s, researcher’s communities began to take shape, and histories of the software industry from a business history perspective began to surface. For instance, Claude Baum’s research on the history of System Development Corporation (SDC), a California-based software company, and Richard L. Forman’s research on the history of Informatics, another software company. However, many of these studies were conducted by journalists and company founders, and there were still existing hagiographical and encyclopedic histories. Additionally, there were numerous studies on the detailed developmental and theoretical history of programming languages and computer technology, such as Richard L. Wexelblat’s History of Programming Languages(Academic Press, 1981) and Martin Campbell-Kelly’s work. The IEEE Annals of the History of Computing also featured FORTRAN in 1984 and COBOL in 1985.

1990s

During the 1990s, textbooks were published that had a significant impact on later years, and especially the late 1990s saw an increase in the number of historians of computing, research topics, and research approaches. Books authored by notable researchers W. Aspray and P. Ceruzzi et al. have undergone multiple editions and continue to serve as the foundation for the history of computing. Also, Michael S. Mahoney, who was a pioneer in the study of software history, shifted his research focus from the history of mathematics to the history of software and conducted pioneering research on software engineering (“The Roots of Software Engineering”, 1990). In addition, there was a technology history approach taken, exemplified by The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America by Paul N. Edwards.

2000s

In the 2000s, the history of computing began to describe a broader perspective beyond individual devices and languages. For example, an international conference on the history of computing held in Germany in April 2000 advocated for the benefits of taking a historical perspective on the boundary work of the discipline of Computer Science, The earliest paper that focused on the birth and establishment of this field of Computer Science is John Lee’s 1996 paper. However, as noted in Matti Tedre’s The Science of Computing: Shaping a Discipline (CRC Press, 2015), Mai Sugimoto’s Artificial Intelligence Eve (Seidosya, 2018), and Peter Denning and Matti Tedre’s Computational Thinking (MIT Press, 2019), this research trend continues to this day. Also, there is a tendency to view software research in relation to logic. For instance, A Science of Operations: Machines, Logic and the Invention of Programming written by Mark A. Priestley claims that the development of the ALGOL language around 1960 strengthened the connection between programming languages and logic. Similarly, Edgar Daylight attempts to clarify the influence of logic in computing through the oral history of early computer scientists. Generally, The history of computing in the 2000s has been dominated by historical studies that focus on theoretical aspects of computing. Representative researchers include Donald MacKenzie, a British sociologist of science, and Michael Mahoney as mentioned above. MacKenzie presents a convincing argument from a social constructivist perspective. The author delves into technical details, explaining how computer-generated mathematical knowledge can be considered trustworthy. Mahoney examines the relationship between computing and mathematical logic, as well as software engineering and computer science, introducing the concept of “agenda”, similar to T. Kuhn’s paradigm. Mahoney’s work was influential in discussing the methodology of the history of computing research, although there are some issues with the retrospective and technical descriptions. The 2000s were a time of rethinking the history of computing. This was evidenced by the creation of a column on historical research methodology called Think Piece in the third issue of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing in 2000.

2010s

Although the 2000s focused more on theoretical aspects of computing, there were also significant social history works that examined computer users like David A. Grier’s When Computer was Human(Princeton University Press, 2007). Since the 2010s, the field of social history has become increasingly diverse in terms of research subjects and approaches. This includes gender history, business history, institutional history, and cultural history. For example, Thomas J. Misa edited a work that deals with gender in the history of computing(Gender Codes: Why Women Are Leaving Computing). Additionally, since 2010, Springer has been publishing the History of Computing series with an emphasis on “external” history. Over 20 books in this series have been published, demonstrating the significant focus on social history in the history of computing in recent years.