The latter opinion was the result of the frequent circumstance that, indeed, the available equipment was a painfully pinching shoe, and in those days one often encountered the naive expectation that, once more powerful machines were available, programming would no longer be a problem, for then the struggle to push the machine to its limits would no longer be necessary and that was all that programming was about, wasn't it?

But in the next decades something completely different happened: more powerful machines became available, not just an order of magnitude more powerful, even several orders of magnitude more powerful. But instead of finding ourselves in a state of eternal bliss with all programming problems solved, we found ourselves up to our necks in the software crisis!

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Only a few years ago this was different: to talk about a software crisis was blasphemy. The turning point was the Conference on Software Engineering in Garmisch, October 1968, a conference that created a sensation as there occurred the first open admission of the software crisis.

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I now suggest that we confine ourselves to the design and implementation of intellectually manageable programs. If someone fears that this restriction is so severe that we cannot live with it, I can reassure him: the class of intellectually manageable programs is still sufficiently rich to contain many very realistic programs for any problem capable of algorithmic solution.

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In a society in which the educational system is used as an instrument for the establishment of a homogenised culture, in which the cream is prevented from rising to the top, the education of competent programmers coult be politically unpalatable.

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The major cause is that the machines have become several orders of magnitude more powerful! To put it quite bluntly: as long as there were no machines, programming was no problem at all; when we had a few weak computers, programming became a mild problem, and now we have gigantic computers, programming has become an equally gigantic problem.