An Overview of Recent Software History?

RobotWisdom asks: "Has anyone run across (or even heard of) an up-to-date overview of the most-important new subdomains for software applications? Inspired by the popularity of my timeline of Unix/Linux, for the last few months I've been working on a new timeline of AI, simulations, and knowledge-representation in general. Digging around online for links about simulation, for example, I discovered vast areas I was completely unaware of, mostly oriented towards the US military. In another context, I started noticing the TLAs 'SCM' and 'CRM' in relation to business software, and had to trackdown what they were all about. This morning I clicked on a banner ad for 'ModelSim' and discovered the TLAs 'HDL' and 'RTL' for simulating logic-chips. Another recent news item led me to the burgeoning field of medical simulations. But what I'm not getting is any sense of an overview of all these specialized domains, that seem to have emerged in software only in the last 30 years. Are there university classes that deal with this, giving a capsule portrait of each one? Textbooks?? Webpages???"

What will be next?

[Blaine Hilton]

I believe this is an outgrowth of the informational society we live in. Programs keep popping up doing things that were not even thought of earlier. 10 years the only CRM was "keep the customer happy", now there are complex mathematical models for such interactions. Everything is now tracked in huge databases and it all goes back to the central idea that information is power.

Go calculate [webcalc.net] something

Re:What about Genetic Programming?

[RobotWisdom]

The timeline seems to be a bit vague in its point.

I'm definitely testing the boundaries by intuition more than any predefined rule, but the intro-page [robotwisdom.com] explains a bit-- it's a history of how our general ability to represent knowledge has evolved.

I've tried to include most borderline cases, but genetic algorithms in the abstract don't represent anything concrete, so I think not.

Guide to Consultant Speak

[Viva Capitalism]

I would have loved to have had something like that when I was looking for my first job in Manhattan as a developer during the Boom.

Before I caught on that the acronyms being thrown at me during interviews were as much to test my ability to BS with the interviewers than to provide any real useful analysis on the spot, I took my failings at understanding them very hard.

Being clueless, I would slink home and look up my vocabulary holes on the web--ERP, ERM, PLM. What the hell were they talking about? All

Yes.

[falsification]

Yes. http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/ [google.com]