In 1951, Saul Gorn was working for the US Army doing complex calculations for the Ballistic Research Laboratory. To do the calculations, he was using some of the first computers: ENIAC, EDVAC, and ORDVAC. But he also had to train students to use them—a task that proved nearly impossible, since each computer had unique ways of inputting programs. Gorn wasn’t the only one facing this issue, which only worsened as the computer industry grew.
Historians David Nofre, Mark Priestly, and Gerard Alberts argue that, because of this situation, the idea of programming as a “language” took off, enabling the discipline of computer science to emerge. From the earliest days of computing, they write, people felt they were communicating with machines. But machines only speak the language of binary, strings of 1s and 0s that control electrical impulses in the computer’s hardware. To properly communicate, engineers needed languages they could understand. And then they needed to translate their languages into those of the machines (known as “compiling”).
A 1954 illustration by Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, an early Navy computer scientist, demonstrates this idea. She drew the UNIVAC computer’s compiler as a robot, translating from a “language easy to write” into a “language easy for computer to understand.” But as computers proliferated, so did these languages.
Saul Gorn was confronting a computing tower of Babel, and he wondered about the possibility of unifying everyone with a single language. Others in academia had the same idea, including John Weber Carr at the University of Michigan, working with the US Air Force on guided missiles. But computer users in industry and across the defense sector were battling against the same problem. They began to form “user groups,” in which firms using the same machines began sharing code.
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“It was in this context, “ Nofre et al. write, “that the idea of common, or universal, languages really caught fire.”
User groups first formed in 1955, including USE (Univac Scientific Exchange), a group that linked members from the Air Force, Lockheed, and Boeing. They shared programs and techniques and started working toward a common programming language. The US military began throwing support behind user groups, ultimately resulting in the development of COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) in 1959, which was meant “to reduce the costs associated with the maintenance of a growing variety of computer systems,” according to the authors.
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The dream of a single universal language never became a reality; COBOL was just one of many languages that emerged, including ALGOL (Algorithmic Language), created for scientific applications. But these languages were “machine-independent,” making them usable on multiple computers and easier for users to talk about in abstract ways.
The language metaphor transformed into a real model for understanding programs. In 1960, write Nofre, Priestly, and Alberts, a new version of ALGOL introduced “a syntax and semantics in a manner reminiscent of Rudolf Carnap’s model of a formal language.” This framework provided tools for studying “algorithms and programming languages themselves”—the foundation of computer science.
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