Happy Birthday, UML!!!
A blog post from my colleague Axel Scheithauer reminded me of the birthday of UML. It seems that no one – including the OMG – except him, has recognized the 20th anniversary of the UML.
I will not copy Axel’s blog post and instead just highlight some facts about UML and give you a gift if you read on. If you understand German, you can read Axel’s blog post here. If not, try the Google-translated English version here.
In 1997 the OMG has published the first version of the Unified Modeling Language: UML 1.1. A major revision was published in 2005 with the UML 2.0. The current version is UML 2.5 published on May 2015. Today, the modeling community and the working groups at the OMG have a stronger focus on SysML than UML. The work on a major revision of SysML has just started.
Now, the gift for you. A true modeling history highlight: The Computer History Museum has published a video of a UML tutorial given by the 3 Amigos Grady Booch, Jim Rumgbauch, and Ivar Jacobson – the fathers of UML – on October 1996.
Happy Birthday, UML!
4 Responses
Our experience with UML begun back in 1995 when it was published by Grady Booch and Jim Rumbaugh of Rational Software Corp. as “Unified Method V0.8”. The whole documentation set comprising of the documents “Overview”, “Metamodel”, “Notation”, “Reference”, and “User Guide”) was only 138 pages (!) long. 1996 a 30 page document called “Unified Modeling Language V0.9” was published (also by Rational) as an addendum to “Unified Method V0.8” this time co-authored by Ivar Jacobson – making the three amigos complete. The first version published by the OMG was not UML 1.1 but UML 1.0 on January 13th, 1997. That version was already 486 pages long, distributed over 13 individual documents, and was quite hard to read. The first wider known (and better readable) version 1.1 of UML was published in September 1997.
Happy new year!
Hi Markus,
Thanks for the clarification. We could only find UML 1.1 in the archives of the OMG. Do you know if UML 1.0 is still available somewhere?
I know the publications from Rational and would like to close the gap between the version 0.9 and 1.1.
Best regards,
Tim
We have all versions in our “museum” ;-)… I will send you the missing pieces via email today.
Best regards,
Markus
Thank you, Markus! The 20th anniversary is a good time to write down the UML history. We will collect the missing information and write another blog post about it.