{"id":27577,"date":"2019-12-16T15:54:22","date_gmt":"2019-12-16T20:54:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=27577"},"modified":"2019-12-30T15:20:00","modified_gmt":"2019-12-30T20:20:00","slug":"tony-brooker-rip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2019\/12\/16\/tony-brooker-rip\/","title":{"rendered":"Tony Brooker, RIP"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cade Metz<\/a> (via Hacker News<\/a>, Slashdot<\/a>):<\/p>\n

Mr. Brooker joined the Manchester lab in October 1951, just after it installed a new machine called the Ferranti Mark 1. His job, he told the British Library in an interview in 2010, was to make the Mark 1 “usable.”<\/p>\n

Mr. Turing had written a user’s manual, but it was far from intuitive. To program the machine, engineers had to write in binary code — patterns made up of 0s and 1s — and they had to write them backward, from right to left, because this was the way the hardware read them.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

In the months that followed, Mr. Brooker wrote a language he called Autocode, based on ordinary numbers and letters. It allowed anyone to program the machine — not just the limited group of trained engineers who understood the hardware.<\/p>\n

This marked the beginning of what were later called “high-level” programming languages[…]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

See also The Guardian<\/a>, Wikipedia<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

See also: Tony Brooker and the Atlas Compiler Compiler<\/a> (PDF, via Hacker News<\/a>).<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cade Metz (via Hacker News, Slashdot): Mr. Brooker joined the Manchester lab in October 1951, just after it installed a new machine called the Ferranti Mark 1. His job, he told the British Library in an interview in 2010, was to make the Mark 1 “usable.” Mr. Turing had written a user’s manual, but it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2019-12-16T20:54:25Z","apple_news_api_id":"498d558b-84cb-4fa9-bef7-f915d8b0f8e8","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2019-12-30T20:20:04Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/ASY1Vi4TLT6m-9_kV2LD46A","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[295,46,71,208],"class_list":["post-27577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-history","tag-languagedesign","tag-programming","tag-rip"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27577"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27577\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27719,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27577\/revisions\/27719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}