Resumen
Writing a historical paper about something you yourself are heavily involved in is clearly difficult; the result is bound to be personal and idiosyncratic and might well sound presumptuous. The author thus viewed an invitation to write about statecharts for the third History of Programming Languages conference in 2007 as an opportunity to put the language in a broader perspective. This article is a greatly abridged version of the resulting conference paper. The implicit claim is that the emergence of the language brought to the forefront a number of ideas that today are central to software and systems engineering, including the general notions of visual formalisms, reactive systems, model-based development, model executability, and full code generation.