In the web's first decade, one 'webmaster' often designed, coded, wrote the copy for, and administered a whole website — the word entered dictionaries in 1993 and got its own reserved email address by internet standard in 1997. As sites grew complex, the role split into front-end developer, back-end developer, DevOps engineer and content editor, and 'webmaster' faded from job listings.
Webmaster no longer exists as a living trade. Here is what erased it, and which profession took on the work.
1950s–1960s
Mainframes and batch programming
Early programs were submitted as decks of punched cards and run in batches, often overnight, so a single typo could cost a programmer an entire day waiting for the next run. Mathematicians, and in large numbers women, moved from hand computation straight into this new 'programming' work, since it was seen as clerical and detail-oriented rather than prestigious. FORTRAN (1957) and COBOL (1959) took hold in this decade, and the sheer difficulty of building reliable large systems on this hardware set up the 'software crisis' the next era would try to name and fix.
What else was happening then
1957
FORTRAN ships for the IBM 704
John Backus's team at IBM releases FORTRAN after about two years of work; within two years, over half of all machine-run code in the US is reportedly written in it.
1968
NATO conference names 'software engineering'
At a conference in Garmisch, West Germany, attendees deliberately borrow the term 'software engineering' to argue that building large programs needs the same discipline as building bridges, framing the field's chronic overruns as a 'software crisis'.
1969–1973
Unix and C take shape at Bell Labs
Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie build the Unix operating system on a spare PDP-7, then rewrite it in Ritchie's new C language in 1973 so it can run on more than one kind of computer.
1981
The IBM PC brings software to every desk
IBM's PC launches with Microsoft's PC-DOS, turning software into a mass consumer product almost overnight and cementing the young company Bill Gates and Paul Allen had founded six years earlier on Altair BASIC.
Where that work lives now
Writes, tests and maintains the code that runs modern life — and is one of the first professions watching AI automate its own daily work.
💻 Software Engineer →