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Jan 1, 1206
Automata
The Kurdish medieval scientist Al-Jazari built programmable automata in 1206 AD. -
ABC
The first electronic digital computer, the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) was desinged to solve linear equations. -
FORTRAN
In 1954, FORTRAN was invented; it was the first widely-used high level programming language to have a functional implementation, as opposed to just a design on paper. -
Spacewar!
Programmed by Steven Russell, Spacewar! is a two-player game where two spaceships, affected by the gravity of a star, fire missles, unaffected by gravity, at each other. -
BASIC
BASIC language developed in 1964 by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz. BASIC is a very limited language and was designed for non-computer science people. -
PASCAL
Pascal was begun in 1968 by Niklaus Wirth. Its development was mainly out of necessity for a good teaching tool. early microprocessor machines which were in use in teaching institutions.
Pascal was designed in a very orderly approach, it combined many of the best features of the languages in use at the time, COBOL, FORTRAN, and ALGOL. -
C
C was developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie while working at Bell Labs in New Jersey. The transition in usage from the first major languages to the major languages of today occurred with the transition between Pascal and C. -
C++
In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, a new programing method was being developed. It was known as Object Oriented Programming, or OOP. Objects are pieces of data that can be packaged and manipulated by the programmer. Bjarne Stroustroup liked this method and developed extensions to C known as “C With Classes.” This set of extensions developed into the full-featured language C++, which was released in 1983. -
Perl
Perl was developed by Larry Wall in 1987 because the Unix sed and awk tools (used for text manipulation) were no longer strong enough to support his needs. Depending on whom you ask, Perl stands for Practical Extraction and Reporting Language or Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister.
