Introduction to Software Engineering

The evolution of electronic computers began in the 1940s. Early efforts in the field of computing were focused on designing the hardware, as that was the challenge, and hardware was where most technical difficulties existed. In the early computing systems, there was essentially no operating system, and the programs were fed with paper tapes or by switches. With the evolution of second generation machines in the 1950s, early concepts of operating systems evolved and single user operating systems came into existence. High level languages, particularly Fortran and Cobol, along with their compilers were developed. There was a gradual trend towards isolating the user from the machine internals, so the user could concentrate on solving the problem at hand, rather than getting bogged down with the machine details.