I started the clock at the birth of the first computer because, obviously [1], one could not begin to solve the practical problem of developing methods for writ

I started the clock at the birth of the first computer because, obviously [1], one could not begin to solve the practical problem of developing methods for writing error-free software before one had hardware to test it on. I'll concede that we seem to be better at controlling the error rates in hardware than we do in software. There are lots of reasons for this; the biggest, ironically, is that custom hardware is very expensive. Therefore, there is little market for highly unstable custom hardware built by high school students. The cost/benefit ratio is all out of whack. It pays, if you're going to build hardware, to take your time and do it very carefully. --- [1] On the one hand, at this point I expect mathematicians to jump out of the woodwork and claim that their illustrious predecessors were able to theoretically predict the future existence of buggy software as early as the nineteenth century. On the other hand, I have a gut feeling that very, very few computer programmers realized how hard it was all going to be before they actually tried it. Nobody ever does, even today. Gedanken software never has bugs.