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Of all the forces shaping human experience today, technology is the least understood. Since the Enlightenment, intellectuals have either ignored technological systems or mythologized them. Few have confronted both the manifold dimensions of the marriage between corporate finance and commercial engineering or the way in which discrete innovations are subordinated to technical architectures, or systems, that alter consciousness and social relations. Given the poverty of technological analysis, it is hard to judge who is more dangerous. The humanist who recoils at the commercial core of technology, or the literate enthusiast who declares a revolution at every turn. This is not to suggest that nuanced thinkers offer any more compelling explanations than Witold Rybczynski's (1983) bald insistence that "technology is not everything." It is correct to say (though of little solace) that a myriad gushing streams flow into the raging river of technology. Consumers invariably learn how to navigate this river whether they ultimately sanctify, modify or simply abandon their various tools. Yet they often are helpless to make sense out of the proliferating technological systems in their midst. The creators of these systems, meanwhile, present their work as a "black box" that eludes the ken of ordinary people. Even they, at times, fail to grasp that their power does not arise from elemental building blocks but durable architectures. The architectures (say, "film" or "the automobile") are themselves subordinate to larger and less transparent webs of architectures (say, "Hollywood," or the "car culture"). Historian Thomas Hughes has aptly described these super-networks as "technological systems" (Hughes, 1989; Rybczynski, 1983). Computer programs are among the most important technological systems. Over the past 25 years, software systems have grown larger and more complex, and they have outgrown their initial niche as handmaiden to computer hardware. Not only do software systems increasingly define the function and quality of computers and computer networks, they also shape the core of many systems, from aviation to military weapons to electronic commerce to health-care delivery. Programming, moreover, is in its infancy. Software systems are likely to become central to bio-engineering and molecular biology. Large-scale research into human genes already has been greatly influenced by software techniques and metaphors. Despite their importance to modern civilization, software systems have drawn relatively scant attention. This partly stems from the rapid ascent of software. Historians and sociologists of technology have not digested the software explosion. Business analysts and professors, while aware of the costs and consequences of weak management of programming projects, have yet to build strong models for the genesis of software architectures and, more importantly, how and why one architecture gives way to another.
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