Technology 1991: software
IEEE Spectrum · 1991
Noteworthy software developments during 1990 are recounted. Amid rapid change, the overall direction seems clear: an ongoing battle among personal computer operating systems, the rise of object-oriented programming (OOP), the spread of computer-aided software engineering (CASE), and the proliferation of frameworks. In the area of operating systems, there are three strong candidates from which to choose-OSF/1, Unix System V Release 4, and DOS with Windows 3.0-and a fourth whose future is not yet clear-OS/2. Meanwhile, the major computer companies have lined up behind OOP, an approach that views a program as being built of objects composed of data and processes, with a child object inheriting characteristics from parent objects: the CASE market is growing far faster than business in the rest of the software industry, and the push is on for standard frameworks that provide multiplatform, multivendor support across the entire computer-aided engineering process.