Simulation and software through 50 years

Abstract

Reflections and recollections spanning a professional lifetime disclose a number of the usual or expected influencing factors or aspects by which an individual's career might be characterized, perhaps even gauged. Persons, projects, organizations, events, and technology advances are familiar shapers of a professional record. However, a surprising factor in this chronology is the role of a classical problem: machine interference or machine repair. This persistent problem recurs at various junctures, sometimes quite subtly at other times rather starkly, throughout the past 50 years. Descriptions of the effects of the expected factors are intertwined with the machine interference problem in this recap of a career in computer simulation and software engineering.