[conspire] Tony Brooker, designed programming language for the first commercial computer, 1925-2019

[Rick Moen]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/13/technology/tony-brooker-dead.html

  Tony Brooker, Pioneer of Computer Programming, Dies at 94

  After meeting Alan Turing, Mr. Brooker went to work at the University
  of Manchester and wrote the programming language for the first
  commercial computer.
   
  By Cade Metz
  Dec. 13, 2019

  Tony Brooker, the mathematician and computer scientist who designed
  the programming language for the world’s first commercial computer, died
  on Nov. 20 at a nursing home in Hexham, England. He was 94.
  [...]

  Mr. Brooker had been immersed in early computer research at the
  University of Cambridge when one day, on his way home from a
  mountain-climbing trip in North Wales, he stopped at the University of
  Manchester to tour its computer lab, which was among the first of its
  kind. Dropping in unannounced, he introduced himself to Alan Turing, a
  founding father of the computer age, who at the time was the lab’s
  deputy director.

  When Mr. Brooker described his own research at the University of
  Cambridge, he later recalled, Mr. Turing said, “Well, we can always
  employ someone like you.” Soon they were colleagues.

  Mr. Brooker joined the Manchester lab in October 1951, just after it
  installed a new machine called the Ferranti Mark 1[0]. His job, he told the
  British Library in an interview in 2010 [link], was to make the Mark 1
  “usable.”

Snip the rest out of respect for copyright, but Brooker improvised in
1954 a coding language called Autocode[1], deemed (I guess for its time) the
beginning of 'high-level' programming languages, and certainly the first
example of a commercially available one.  It was almost
machine-independent, and had floating-point support.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autocode#Mark_1_Autocode

In 1960, he followed up this achievement by creating the first 'compiler
compiler', this time for a new machine called Atlas[2].  In the mid-60s, he
guided U. of Manchester in putting together Britain's first CS degree
program[me], and then a similar one at U. of Essex, where he was
Chairman of the CS department until retirement in 1988.

Another interesting connection noted in the article:  Ferranti
International PLC, the company behind the Mark 1 for which Brooker
created Autocode, put together a team that wrote test programs in that
language, whose members included Mary Lee Woods, whose son was Tim
Berners-Lee, founder of the World-Wide Web.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferranti#Computers


[0] The Ferranti Mark 1 was almost identical to its research predecessor,
the famous Manchester Mark 1, and was the world's first commercially
available general-purpose electronic computer:  The first production
unit was delivered just before UNIVAC 1 made it out the door.  It was of
course vacuum-tube based.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferranti_Mark_1

[1] According to Wikipedia, at the time, the term 'autocode' was also a
family-generic term for any 'simplified coding system', which was what
programming languages were called before that term was coined, but i
especially for 'autocoder' systems running on Manchester's Ferranti Mark 1.  
Of those 'autocoders', Brooker's was the second example at Manchester:
His colleague Alick Glennie had created the first iteration of Autocode in
1952 -- along with a compiler for it, thereby creating the first
compiled programming language.  Brooker's replacement was far less
machine-dependent than Glennie's had been, and was probably for that
reason released by the U. of Manchester lab for public commercial use,
whereas Glennie's wasn't.

Glennie was, along with Alan Turing, among the designers of the
(above-mentioned) forerunner machine, the Manchester Mark 1, which
pioneered the use of index registers and many other influential ideas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Mark_1

[2] Ferranti Atlas was one of the world's first supercomputers, in use
from 1962 to 1971, and the first computer to implement virtual memory
using paging techniques.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_(computer)