[SIGCIS-Members] Tony Brooker: Obituary

[Brian Randell]

Hi:

I recently received the sad news of the demise of another British computing pioneer, Tony Brooker, described by Martin Campbell-Kelly in the obituary he wrote for the Guardian Newspaper as having “designed and implemented the world’s first high-level programming language”, the Manchester Autocode early in 1954 - see https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/dec/05/tony-brooker-obituary

I knew and greatly liked and respected Tony, though I was not a user of any of his software, since I had no access to the types of computer on which it ran. I am pleased that Martin has produced such a fitting obituary, which also rightly describes Tony’s work on the compiler-compiler as “a milestone in the development of programming in the 1960s”.

Cheers

Brian Randell


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