In 1947, three scientists at Bell Telephone Laboratories, William Shockley, Walter Brattain, and John Bardeen created the transistor. Modern computing was beginning. In 1956 at MIT the first fully transistor based computer was completed, the TX0. In 1958 at Texas Instruments, Jack Kilby created the first integrated circuit. But even before the first integrated circuit existed, the first high level language had already been written. In 1954 Fortran, the Formula Translator, had been written. It began as Fortran I in 1956. Fortran begot Algol 58, the Algorithmic Language, in 1958. Algol 58 begot Algol 60 in 1960. Algol 60 begot CPL, the Combined Programming Language, in 1963. CPL begot BCPL, Basic CPL, in 1967. BCPL begot B in 1969. B begot C in 1971. B was the first language in the C lineage directly, having been created at Bell Labs by Ken Thompson. B was an interpreted language, used in early, internal versions of the UNIX operating system. Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, also of Bell Labs, improved B, calling it NB; further extensions to NB created C, a compiled language. Most of UNIX was rewritten in NB and then C, which led to a more portable operating system. B was of course named after BCPL, and C was its logical successor. The portability of UNIX was the main reason for the initial popularity of both UNIX and C. So rather than creating a new operating system for each new machine, system programmers could simply write the few systemdependent parts required for the machine, and write a C compiler for the new system. Thereafter since most of the system utilities were written in C, it simply made sense to also write new utilities in that language. ← Histor y| Using a Compiler →
Posted on: Wed, 03 Jul 2013 16:08:12 +0000