IEEE Annals of the History of Computing

Algol was a high-level programming language, created by American and European mathematicians in the late 1950s. It sparked a wave of debates, projects and counter-projects, and remained lively in academic spheres until the 1970s. This article focuses on Algol, less as a programming language than as a research programme, an object of circulation and translation, and a decisive step in the building ... View full abstract»

In the 1950s, Czechoslovakian computing was more famous for its fault-tolerant computers, SAPO and EPOS, than for developments in automatic programming. However, the Algol effort did not go unnoticed there. It was quite the contrary, even though its appeal to Czechoslovakian computer programmers only became manifest in their work after the publication of the preliminary report on the algorithmic l... View full abstract»

Beginning in the mid-1960s, electromechanical telecommunications switches were increasingly replaced by computer-controlled switches. Production and development of this equipment relied on the construction of its software. This software was shaped by practices, ideas, and ideals appropriated from the computer industry and computer science as much as by concerns and constraints of the telecommunica... View full abstract»

During the 1950s, computer programming was a local practice. Programs from one computing center would not work on computers elsewhere. For example, programs written in Munich differed radically in style from programs written in Amsterdam. Similar problems were also encountered in the United States, leading American computer programmers in 1954 to combine the ideal of a machine-independent programm... View full abstract»

In the late 1960s, tensions were erupting in corporate and academic computing cultures in the United States and abroad with competing views about the state of computer programming and possible future implications. A discourse of "software crisis" was ignited in 1968 when NATO hosted a conference on the topic of software engineering. The author examines the rhetoric of crisis, revolution, and promi... View full abstract»

In the late 1960s, artists and engineers began building increasingly sophisticated video synthesizers, machines that produced abstract or distorted images by electronically manipulating either a video signal or the cathode ray tube on which it was displayed. This article explores how experimental videographers modeled video synthesizers on audio synthesizers, conceptualized them as analog computer... View full abstract»