Wow, this is a talk from June 1976. After this talk he published it as “The early development of programming languages” with Luis Trabb Pardo as a Stanford repo

Wow, this is a talk from June 1976. After this talk he published it as “The early development of programming languages” with Luis Trabb Pardo as a Stanford report in August 1976 (available online e.g. https://archive.org/details/DTIC_ADA032123 https://archive.org/details/DTIC_ADA032123), then "for real" as a contribution to a 1977 encyclopedia, and the definitive version collected as Chapter 1 of his "Selected Papers on Computer Languages". When that collection came out in 2003, he gave a talk at the Computer History Museum, under the title "A Dozen Precursors of Fortran", available here: https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102622137 https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10262213... as a .wmv file; I've also reuploaded to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGt86UHRAXY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGt86UHRAXY Talk description: > The history of a subject helps us not only to understand how the important ideas were born but also to appreciate the amount of progress that has been made. The history of programming languages is a striking example, because basic concepts that we now regard as self-evident were by no means obvious a priori; many years of hard work by brilliant and dedicated people were necessary before these basic principles were learned. > This talk will discuss contributions of Zuse (1945), Goldstine and von Neumann (1946), Curry (1948), Mauchly et al (1949), Burks (1950), Wheeler (1951), Rutishauser (1951), Böhm (1951), Glennie (1952), Hopper et al (1953), Laning and Zierler (1953), Brooker (1954), Kaminynin and Ljubimskiy (1954), Ershov (1955), Grems and Porter (1955), Elsworth et al (1955), Blum (1956), Perlis et al (1956), Katz et al (1956), Bauer and Samelson (1956), Melahn et al (1956), as well as the prototype of FORTRAN developed by Backus et al from 1954 to 1957. At least a dozen of these efforts will be illustrated by showing how a particular procedure called the TPK algorithm might have been coded at the time. It may be interesting to watch this 1976 talk and the 2003 talk, and see if anything has changed in the history. :-)