Many people are aware that in 1968 an inaugural conference in Software Engineering was held in Garmisch, Germany under the auspices of NATO, and that a follow-up conference was organised the next year, 1969 in Rome, Italy.
Although the reports from those two conferences are reasonably well distributed, if not perhaps as well read, there exists an appendix that the report editor, Brian Randell, notes:
Unlike the first conference, at which it was fully accepted that the term software engineering
expressed a need rather than a reality, in Rome there was already a slight tendency to talk as
if the subject already existed. And it became clear during the conference that the organizers