Oxide and Friends Software Engineering Past, Present, and Future with Grady Booch
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Feb 7, 2026 
Grady Booch, software engineering pioneer and cofounder of Rational Software, shares stories from building early computers to shaping object-oriented design. He walks through SAGE, the software crisis, UML, and how packages, frameworks, and LLMs reshape engineering. Conversation touches on durable versus disposable software, the limits of LLMs, and timeless skills like abstraction, coupling, cohesion, and judgment.
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Early Hands-On Origins
- Grady built his first computer from discrete transistors at age 12 and taught himself Fortran from an IBM manual.
- He ran his first programs on an IBM 1130 and kept the punch cards as a memento.
SAGE To Apollo: Roots Of Software Engineering
- Grady described SAGE and Margaret Hamilton's role in coining "software engineering" and her work on Apollo.
- He links those Cold War systems to how modern large distributed real-time systems evolved.
Software Evolves By Raising Abstraction
- Every age of software raises the level of abstraction, from assembly to compilers to objects to packages and platforms.
- Abstraction shifts reduce cognitive distance and enable new kinds of software and creativity.
