Origins of Configuration Management

Configuration Management can be traced back in origins to the early 1950s, an era of punch cards and large mainframe computing apparatuses. Punch cards at the time often needed to be organized and delivered to the mainframe, and as a result of this specific ordering, a requirement was mandated by larger organizations to manage the configuration of such punch cards. After the golden days of punch cards, additional management requirements came to light with regard to maintaining the state of a given software system or IT apparatus. Entities capable of managing such a process at the time were limited to the government's CDC Update and IBM's IBM IEBUPDATE, respectively.

It wasn't until the early to mid 1990s that software Configuration Management (CM for short) began to be taken notice of in mid- to large-scale organizations. Companies and organizations such as IBM and the Department of Defense were among the first adopters of Configuration Management techniques. At this time, Configuration Management was limited in scope to identifying configuration implementations and changes that were added to a given system (or set of systems). This was in an effort to track the steps necessary to recreate the system or deployment if the system were to fail or have some kind of fault. Thus removing the manual efforts that had preceded this innovation.