Software engineering is an aspiration, not an accomplishment. - proceedings of a 1968 NATO summit on software engineering

The Software Crisis
These grim perspectives sound familiar, but I left out one detail: This wasn't a recent conference. Every word I have quoted, and thousands more like them, can be found in the proceedings of a 1968 summit on software engineering—the first event of its kind, organized by NATO as its member nations stared into the eyes of what they had just begun to call "The Software Crisis."
After IBM's OS/360 disaster and other problematic large-scale software projects, the NATO partners, still jousting in a global Cold War that had extended its competition into outer space, decided that software development had become an urgent international problem. They gathered dozens of their best minds in Garmisch, Germany, a secluded Bavarian ski resort, and asked them for some insight on the subjects of software reliability, quality control, cost control, and scheduling — the topics we refer to today under the catchall phrase "software engineering."
In the decades since that conference, these two words, software and engineering, have become fused at the hip, like government and bureaucracy or fast and food. At vast corporations and tiny start-ups alike, any employee who can throw together a quick script to automate something is given the title of software engineer. Not everyone is happy about this. In 2003, some programmers in Texas who referred to themselves as software engineers on their business cards received cease-and-desist letters from the state's Board of Professional Engineers, which jealously protects use of the label. But despite such bureaucratic rearguard actions, the term has become universal, only rarely raising questions about whether the parallel between building structures and building code makes sense.
That was not a foregone conclusion in 1968. When the Garmisch organizers named their event a conference on software engineering, they "fully accepted that the term... expressed a need rather than a reality," according to Brian Randell, a British software expert who organized the conference's report. "The phrase 'software engineering' was deliberately chosen as being provocative, in implying the need for software manufacture to be based on the types of theoretical foundations and practical disciplines, that are traditional in the established branches of engineering."
The conference attendees intended to map out how they might bring the chaotic field of software under the scientific sway of engineering; it was an aspiration, not an accomplishment.
Yet something apparently happened in the interval between the 1968 conference, which left participants enthusiastic and excited, and its successor in Rome the following year. The second gathering aimed to focus on specific techniques of software engineering.

an excerpt from DREAMING IN CODE by Scott Rosenberg