The History of Programming

• The Early Years
  • 1946 - Konrad Zuse (german) develops Plankalk�l (first programming language)
  • 1949 - Short Code, first computer language for electronic computing device
  • 1951 - Grace Hopper first widely known compiler A-0 (aka MATH-MATIC)
  • 1952 - Alick E. Glennie develop Autocode
  • 1957 - FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslating system) is developed
  • 1958 - Original ALGOL (ALGOrithm Language) specification appears
  • 1958 - John McCarthy begins work on LISP (LISt Processing)
  • 1959 - COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) appears
• The Sixties & Seventies
  • 1962 - Kenneth Iverson documents APL (A Programming Language)
  • 1962 - First Video Game, Space War from MIT
  • 1964 - BASIC (Beginners All-Purpose Instruction Code) from Dartmouth U
  • 1964 - PL/1 is released
  • 1968 - Niklaus Wirth begins work on Pascal. Cobol defined by ANSI
  • 1970 - Work on Prolog begins
  • 1970 - Xerox PARC starts Smalltalk. Pascal implementation appears
  • 1972 - Dennis Ritchie produces C
  • 1975 - Bill Gates & Paul Allen write and sell version BASIC to MITS
• Contemporary Programming
  • 1980 - Bjarne Stroustrup develops C with Classes, forerunner of C++
  • 1983 - Ada appears, termed after Augusta Ada (Babbages analytical engine)
  • 1986 - C++ appears
  • 1989 - ANSI C specification is published
  • 1991 - Visual Basic appears
  • 1995 - Ada is revised to Ada 95, includes OOP and real-time features
  • 1995 - Java is released
  • 1997 - ANSI C++ draft standard