The title is deceptive. This more a history of programming hardware platforms than of the activities of programming.
A second defect is that this is the viewpoint of an academic who worked in small group rather than a commercial organization that created and maintained software. Even back in the era of mainframes there were tools and best practices for groups of programmers to produce commercial software.
Although not short, Nathan Ensmenger's "The Computer Boys Take Over" is a fantastic history of the complicated and diverse roots of software. In the intro he states, like the comment above, that the history of software tend toward linear histories of hardware development. In his book however, he shows how management strategies, training centers, universities, corporations, and the programmers themselves attempt to control the meaning and production of software. The first chapter does a great job of summarizing this trajectory.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 41.3 ms ] threadA second defect is that this is the viewpoint of an academic who worked in small group rather than a commercial organization that created and maintained software. Even back in the era of mainframes there were tools and best practices for groups of programmers to produce commercial software.