The history of pair programming

Pair programming has been around for a long time in the history of software development, even from the early days, when programming meant plugging in some wires into a control dashboard or inserting punch cards into a reader in order to compile your program.

It's just that people who used to program back in the day didn't call it pair programming; they called it simple, plain programming. You needed to do things in pairs because of the wires or the cards that were cumbersome to use.

Then came the era of industrial programming where, little by little, pushed by the need for automatization and computers being more affordable, programmers were working more and more alone. It was an age of simpler programs, but it took a long time to write, compile, check, fix, improve, write, compile, and so on.

After a while, computers started becoming more powerful and even more affordable. So, companies started automating more complex parts of their business flows. We are talking about financial systems, travel, trade, and so on. You had a complex domain already, but programmers were working alone, as in any other factory. They had a boss, like in any other factory, and a manager, like in any other factory.

The only problem with comparing factory workers with programmers is that programmers need to solve problems that are from non-routine work, while factory workers had a clear routine that might have been subject to change every once in a while. That is the moment when the concept of the knowledge worker appeared in the management literature:

"Every knowledge worker in a modern organization is an "executive" if, by virtue of his position or knowledge, he is responsible for a contribution that materially affects the capacity of the organization to perform and to obtain results."

- Peter Drucker in The Effective Executive (1966)

Pair programming then reappeared in some areas, and younger programmers read about the older ways of programming. They started using it with great success, and it felt very natural to have two people coding for a task. Plain pair programming is a simple system of managing complexity and gaining better results.