Bob Munck
Bob Munck
Nov 2 · 3 min read

In the spring of 1965, the first two PhDs in computer science in this country were awarded by the University of Pennsylvania to Andy van Dam and Dick Wexelblatt. Dick went to Bell Labs and was involved in creating the Computer Science program at Stevens Institute of Tech. (I later almost worked for him at the Institute for Defense Analysis, but went to a DARPA program instead.)

Andy went to the Applied Math Department at Brown University and began to teach a 2-semester computer science course. I was in that first course and by the end of the first semester had switched my major from physics to CS. I gave a couple of lectures in the second semester and next year and co-taught the course with Andy after I graduated.

In the late 60s, we began the process of separating from the Apple Math Department into a department of our own. This is kind of a big deal for a 200-year-old university. We wanted to call it Software Engineering, but the Engineering Department objected very strongly and since several of our professors were coming from Electrical Engineering, we gave in and called it Computer Science. We were inspired to use “software engineering” by the 1968 NATO conference that used that term and by Tony Oettinger’s 1966 letter to the ACM.

(Of this year’s Brown graduating class, one-sixth of the undergraduate degrees were in Computer Science; pretty much every graduate took at least one CS course. Andy is still teaching at Brown and a close friend.)

While at Brown I also worked with Tim Mutch on the vision system for the Viking Landers. There is software of mine sitting on Mars.

From 1983 to 1990 I worked in the Ada Group at MITRE Corporation in Bedford MA. My boss was Judy Clapp. Judy is known as one of the developers of the field of software engineering. She received a Masters from Harvard in 1952 and went to work on Whirlwind at MIT. Margaret Hamilton joined the project nine years later and may well have worked with or for Judy. Whirlwind became the SAGE Air Defense System and MIT created Lincoln Labs for it. Lincoln Labs split off MITRE as an Air Force R&D lab.

While at MITRE and DARPA, I had quite a bit to do with DoD’s Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon, and still have a number of friends there. My wife was one of the principal developers of their Capability Maturity Model.

I must admit I’d never heard of Robert C. Martin. I’m not a huge fan of Agile, consider it just another development fad. I’m very much not a fan of C and its derivatives like C++ and JavaScript; they violate many of the principles we developed in the Ada community.

“at the time, computer science and software engineering were not yet established disciplines…”
When Apollo 11 went up, we had had digital computers for over 25 years and mechanical computers back another 100 years to Babbage. There’s no way you can convince me that the work of Turing, von Neumann, Dijkstra, Backus, Shannon, Hoare, Perlis, Parnas, Eckert, Boole, Licklider, Knuth, Brooks, Wirth, Wilkes, and Corbató did not constitute an “established discipline.”

    Bob Munck

    Written by

    Bob Munck

    Old Techie, retired. Physics, App. Math, Computer Science. R&D for DARPA, Unisys, MITRE, NRL. Taught at Brown, VA Tech, Trondheim.