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I was doing some software history research and stumbled on this absolutely FASCINATING letter from 1964: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/... Some random defense contractor writes in to say "You should deliver a minimal prototype as fast as possible to get feedback and involve users at every stage of labor"

FWIW (& you may know these already), a few other bits and pieces about the "Some observations concerning large programming efforts" paper. It did get some attention: it's listed in William E. Riddle's 103-page 1972 "Annotated Bibliography of Software Architecture" slac.stanford.edu/vault/collva... …

which was CGTM (Stanford Computation Research Group Technical Memo ahro.slac.stanford.edu/resources/di... ) no. 138. (Riddle was championing the name 'software architecture' over 'software engineering'.)

It also got a mention in /Datamation/'s writeup of the 1964 Spring Joint Computer Conference, in the "Command and Control" session highlights (/Datamation/ April 1964, pp. 76-77 www.bitsavers.org/magazines/Da... ).

That’s amazing! Great find! Wonder if any other utterances of that person could be identified somehow…