Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
guage was in turn overly fat in its revised 1968 release. ALGOL-68 provided a vast array
of tools which, taken together, were hard to understand and harder still to coordinate. In the
end, ALGOL's chief contribution to programming was its inspiration of the far more grace-
ful and tightly structured
Pascal
language, developed by the Swiss Federal Technical Insti-
tute's Nicholas Wirth as a response (and solution) to the needless complexity of ALGOL.
Another failure was PL/1 (Programming Language, One) - developed by IBM for its
System/360 series. Released in 1964, PL/1 adopted various aspects of COBOL, FORTRAN
and ALGOL. However, like ALGOL, it proved to be needlessly complex. More important,
perhaps, was the fact that by the time of its release FORTRAN and COBOL had already
become staples amongst programmers working on the System/360. Thus few saw the need
to adopt PL/1, and the language faded fast.
Elsewhere, the future was brewing. As 1969 inched its way towards the end of the dec-
ade, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, working on a DEC PDP-7 machine at the Bell
Telephone Labs in New Jersey, started to create what would one day be called the UNIX
operating system - a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system destined to be-
come highly popular for use in workstation environments. Parallel to this they also built
a programming language labeled "B" - a descendant of the old BCPL (Basic Combined
Programming Language), a procedural, structured computer programming language de-
signed by Martin Richards of the University of Cambridge in 1966. This would eventu-
ally be refined and evolve into the language C, informally defined by Brian Kernighan and
Dennis Ritchie in a seminal 1978 topic, and thenceforward often referred to as "K&R C."
Kernighan's and Ritchie's definition of the language was later, in large measure, to form the
ANSI C standard. Both the UNIX operating system and the C language were to exert ter-
rific impacts on software development throughout the 1970s, and beyond, especially with
the dawn of object-oriented programming using C/C++.
*
It is important to remind ourselves that while all the above revolutions were happening
on the computer landscape, another revolution was happening in the streets. No one needs
a tutorial on the rise of the counter-culture during the period of the sixties. That computing
and the Woodstock generation came of age at the same point of time would prove fortuitous
for both. A freewheeling tendency not to buy into accepted wisdom, and to innovate with
abandon, was to typify the best in computing development going forward: the products of
free thinkers.
As editor Jim Warren would write in
Dr. Dobb's Journal
- a programming publication
founded at the height of the hobbyist movement in the 1970s - the personal computer "had
its genetic coding in the 1960s' ... antiestablishment, antiwar, pro-freedom, anti-discipline
attitudes."
