Algol

The first steps in the development of an algorithmic language (programming language) were made by Konrad Zuse in 1948. His notation was fairly universal. However, it never received the recognition it deserved. Three years later, Heinz Rutishauser showed how a program written in an algorithmic language could be translated by a computer into machine code - the idea of a compiler.

A compiler translates a program written in a higher programming language into machine code that can be executed by a computer. By this means, powerful and extensive commands became possible which corresponded to a multitude of machine code instructions. And only by the use of compilers was it possible that a single program could be transferred and executed on different platforms and hardware. The inseparable unity of program and machine which had persisted so far was overcome. The first higher programmier language for scientific calculating was Fortran I (Formula Translating), developed by IBM and presented for the first time in 1954.
Shortly afterwards, a conference on electronic calculating machines and information processing took place in Darmstadt which caused the formation of the technical committee for programming languages of the "Society for Applied Mathematics and Mechanics" (GAMM) in 1955. Their goal was the definition of an universal algorithmic language. By the time this committee had finished their work in 1957, they realised that  in the meantime various other proposals for the same proplem had been presented. Therefore, the GAMM established connections with the "Association for Computing Machinery" (ACM) in America to find a common line of actions and development and to coordinate them worldwide.
In 1958, a joint meeting took place in Zurich where a first report on the new universal programming language Algol was adopted. One of the main concerns of this Algol 58 specification was the portability of programs between different hardware architectures. Last but not least, Algol was intended to break the predominance of IBM with its hardly controllable Fortran (new features were simply added to the language parallel to the development of more powerful hardware) and to offer a systematically developed language instead. Heinz Rutishauser, who was important in the construction of the ERMETH, being a member of the GAMM technical committee too, was deeply involved into the early development of Algol.

In May 1960, the GAMM-ACM-committee released the Algol 60 specifications. The committee was formed by 13 persons coming from seven different European countries and the USA. At first, the further development of the language was meant to consist of a few additions and corrections of Algol 58; it soon became clear, though, that a total revision with fundamentally new definitions would be needed. During the second half of the 1960s, Algol 60 - in particular the subset of it - became the most widely used programming language in Europe. Like Fortran it was used for scientific calculations as opposed to Cobol (Common Business Oriented Language) which was mainly used for business applications. Algol 60 included many elements which are still fundamental to programming languages of today: reserved keywords for commands, dynamic arrays, user-defined types and recursion. Algol can be described as the Latin of programming languages.

Its successor Algol 68 was, in spite of its name, a totally new development of the programming language. To fathers of Algol 60 like Rutishauser, but also to younger scientists like Niklaus Wirth - who was a member of the Working Group with the charter of defining a successor to Algol 60 - the language was becoming too clumsy, too complex and not reasonably compilable anymore. When Wirth's pragmatic and simplifying proposals were dismissed by the group, he went his own way and developed Algol-W, a simplified extension of the language for non-numerical applications. At that time, he was assistant professor at Stanford where he was working in the Department for Computer Science which had been founded in 1965. There, Algol-W was installed on the new IBM 360 computers and replaced Fortran in the programming courses. Setting out from Algol-W, Wirth lateron defined Pascal, a strongly structured language which at first was mainly developed for educational purposes.