An Awesome List of books, videos, and other resources for learning about the history of software engineering.
The list is geared towards new and practicing software engineers, rather than professional historians. Most of the sources are secondary and tertiary rather than primary, "history" rather than "historical". For lists of seminal papers and other primary sources, see the Other lists section.
Items in bold are good starting points.
- Grady Booch: "The History of Software Engineering"
- Martin Campbell-Kelly: "The History of the History of Software"
- Paul Graham: "The Roots of Lisp"
- Michael Mahoney: "Finding a History for Software Engineering"
- Wikipedia: "History of programming languages"
- Wikipedia: "History of software engineering"
- Niklaus Wirth: "A Brief History of Software Engineering"
- Kurt W. Beyer: Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age
- Federico Biancuzzi: Masterminds of Programming: Conversations with the Creators of Major Programming Languages
- Fred Brooks: The Mythical Man Month
- Manfred Broy and Ernst Denert (editors): Software Pioneers: Contributions to Software Engineering
- Martin Campbell-Kelly: From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry
- History of Programming Languages (HOPL) Conference Proceedings
- Christopher Kelty: Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software
- Glenn Krasner: Bits of History, Words of Advice
- Harry R. Lewis (ed.): Ideas That Created the Future: Classic Papers of Computer Science
- Lev Manovich: Software Takes Command
- Charles Petzold: Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software
- Eric S. Raymond: The Art of Unix Programming
- Peter Seibel: Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming
- Joe Armstrong: "The Forgotten Ideas in Computer Science"
- Birth of BASIC
- Computer History Museum: Oral Histories
- Talks by Alan Kay
- Donald Knuth: "Let's Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science"
- Ted Nelson: "Computers for Cynics" video series
- Turing lectures
- Bret Victor: "The Future of Programming"
- Software Engineering Radio Episode 167: The History of JUnit and the Future of Testing with Kent Beck
- SOSP History Day
- Wheeler lectures
- History of Ada
- Guido van Rossum: The History of Python
- Online Historical Encyclopaedia of Programming Languages
- ACM Classic Books Collection
- 20 Years of the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation 1979-1999: A Selection
- Seminal Papers in Software Engineering: The Carnegie Mellon Canonical Collection
- Awesome Computer History
- Princeton COS 583: Great Moments in Computing syllabus
- Wikipedia: "List of important publications in computer science"