Systems modeling

[3] The function model originates in the 1950s, after in the first half of the 20th century other types of management diagrams had already been developed.

[5] In the 1960s it was exploited by the NASA to visualize the time sequence of events in a space systems and flight missions.

[7] One of the earliest pioneering works in information systems modeling[8] has been done by Young and Kent (1958), who argued: They aimed for a precise and abstract way of specifying the informational and time characteristics of a data processing problem, and wanted to create a notation that should enable the analyst to organize the problem around any piece of hardware.

Their efforts was not so much focused on independent systems analysis, but on creating abstract specification and invariant basis for designing different alternative implementations using different hardware components.

[8] A next step in IS modeling was taken by CODASYL, an IT industry consortium formed in 1959, who essentially aimed at the same thing as Young and Kent: the development of "a proper structure for machine independent problem definition language, at the system level of data processing".