Maurice Wilkes, the developer of EDSAC, the first stored-program computer, had a startling insight while climbing the stairs of his laboratory in 1949. In Memoirs of a Computer Pioneer, he recalled, “The realization came over me with full force that a good part of the remainder of my life was going to be spent in finding errors in my own programs.” Surely every programmer of a stored-program computer since then can sympathize with Wilkes, though perhaps not without some bemusement at his naïveté about the difficulties of software construction.
