1987/04 Monterey - Monterey conference |
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This is the journal of my trip to Monterey in the spring of 1987 for a software engineering conference. I was there, I think, to soak up as much information on the subject as I could and then give a class or presentation to management on how we could use it to improve the development of our software.
For decades there had been a desire for more efficient and reliable techniques for converting a set of requirements into a set of instructions that could be executed by a computer system. Programming was more of an art than a science and there were plenty of examples of systems that were delivered years late, or were unreliable, or were never finished at all.
Some programmers would draw flow charts on paper to get a feeling for how the system should be structured, but there was no easy way to maintain the charts over time. With the advent of “graphical” workstations, which could display boxes and arrows there was a possibility of tying the system’s requirements to its functions and its code. There were new tools like Software through Pictures that held the promise of generating the code automatically. That’s what the conference was all about and it’s probably more than you want to know. The conference schedule was relaxed enough to allow time for exploring the area.
Usually my trip journals are organized by time but I don’t remember when I went where, so I’ve ordered this journal by place, beginning on Monterey Bay and traveling south to Big Sur and Jules Pfeiffer state park.
The conference was held in Monterey, a city on California’s Pacific coast, about a hundred miles south of San Francisco. The city was built by Spain, subsequently became part of Mexico, and finally part of the United States. It’s considered to have a Mediterranean climate and to be a very pleasant (but expensive) place to live.
Monterey Bay is located at the end of the large and deep underwater Monterey Canyon and it benefits from the upwelling of cool, nutrient-rich water. For a few decades Monterey prospered from fishing for sardines but the sardine population collapsed in the 1950s due to overfishing.
The conference was held in one of the city’s hotels but I was staying at a hotel in Seaside, a little town a few miles north around the bay. I could have walked to the conference with no problem but it was far enough for the company to spring for a car. The hotel was nothing special but it was located on a sandy beach with a nice view across the bay to Monterey