Why Is It Interesting To Dive Deep Into Software History?

Remember when you had to spend time restoring a crashed system in the small hours because some software messed it up? Or when you had barely 38 kilobytes of memory to create software that is aimed to be helpful, and you needed more spare memory for such luxury as developer tooling or extra memory usage of anything aimed to ease developer work seemed a waste? Or when there was a chance that your executable file won't fit on your floppy disk? Did anyone expect that we would hold a complete and robust operating system in our pockets in the form of smartphones?

Software History Helps Us Understand The Structure Of Existing Solutions

What do I refer to as software history in terms of this article? Considering the accelerated pace of innovation, we do not need to think in centuries. You can just view the changelog of your favorite open-source software and pick some points of interest. Every changelog tells a story; why did development halt at an end, why did it accelerate, and what were the pain points and hurdles?

When you deal with a piece of software and suppose you do not yet know the development history, you treat the existing solution as natural. If you dive deep into software history to learn more about the relation of the software you use to the industry and whether it is in an uptrend or a downtrend, you will gain a thorough understanding of what you can expect from that software, its community and how you could rewrite its parts if necessary.

Also, learning more about the history of a specific piece of software can be a great helper in remembering software details, as you get more points that can help you remember software functionality.

Software History Helps Us Solve Issues

The common question is, how did we do this and that earlier in the past by years?

Recalling our early memories can create a more specific context of complex software, therefore, can help us build a new breed of an existing solution.

This approach helps us rebuild something without reintroducing its early problems. Knowing earlier industry issues make us wiser while rewriting the software we use without the burden of continuously resolving problems that are there because of the past is a great advantage.

Software History Highlights Effect Of Bigger Players

There were those issues when we had to ask, "Why is it solved that way?", "Why did it change rapidly in that direction?" We can yet again examine software history. Consider that example of CSS. You may ask why it is solved that way; is it a practical solution? And then, later, you can discover that big industry players were pushing for CSS to thrive, creating a faster CSS runtime. On the other hand, there was no push toward shifting in the direction of another technology that could replace CSS.

Case Study - Docker

The history of Docker and containerization, in general, give us a great opportunity to come across the above highlights, as I will analyze this in length in further articles.

Thanks for reading; I'll be back with more articles, meanwhile follow my podcasts on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1wn2UWb2ExY9Os9wtxXBEO