My mentor, the historian Gerard Alberts, has advised me repeatedly during the past four years not to use technological concepts, like `program', `compiler', and `universal Turing machine', as subjects of my sentences. Instead, I should use historical actors. For example, I should not write

During the 1950s, a universal Turing machine became widely accepted as a conceptual abstraction of a computer.

Instead, I should write

By 1955, Saul Gorn viewed a universal Turing machine as a conceptual abstraction of his computer.

The late Michael Mahoney warned his fellow historians of computing not to fall into the trap of viewing everything with the same glasses. The computer, Mahoney said specifically, is not one thing but many different things. He continued as follows:

Last year, Lonely Scholar published my book The Dawn of Software Engineering: from Turing to Dijkstra. Some reviews were already online half a year ago. In the meantime, more coverage has become available:

Dijkstra tackled the problem of allowing multiple users share the university's X8 computer and its peripheral hardware devices (EWD 51). To solve this problem, Dijkstra first reformulated it in terms of as many symmetries as he could find, thereby obtaining a more general problem description.

In 1962 Christopher Strachey reasoned about ALGOL60 programs in terms of machine efficiency and, hence, to a non negligible extent he worked from the machine to the language. Dijkstra, by contrast, insisted on reasoning from ALGOL60 to the machine. In Strachey's words: