ObituaryTony Brooker, who has died aged 94, was a pioneer of computer programming and education. He designed and implemented the world’s first high-level programming language, at Manchester University, and was later founding professor of computer science at Essex University.
For those who have ever programmed anything from a PROM, a computer or even a humble old VCR, there is something of Mr Brooker's palimpsest in the methodology used to do this.
Mr Brooker worked at Manchester University during the period Alan Turing was deputy director of the computing machine laboratory of Manchester University. It was said that Turing was so smart that he failed to see why people couldn't program in binary using Base 32 to do floating point arithmetic and it was left to people like Brooker et al to develop a programming language that lesser mortals could use, thus making computers such as the Manchester Mark 1 more generally useful.
Brooker also went on to design a language used to program/develop compilers for other languages.Although nominally deputy director of the laboratory, Turing was so absorbed by his own research that he failed to help other people use the Manchester computer. The machine was formidably difficult to program, typically taking two weeks for a novice to get to grips with. Brooker designed a simplified programming system, the Manchester Autocode, which was introduced early in 1954. The system was fully described on two sides of foolscap, took just half a day to learn, and allowed many more casual users to get results from the machine. He later developed the Mercury Autocode for the university’s next computer.
The list of Manchester Computers was seminal in the development of UK computing by companies such as Ferranti and ICL.
He should be remembered alongside people like Rear Vice Admiral Grace Hopper (an American of course and inventor of COBOL and the term bug) as someone who made programming easier and more generally applicable outside scientific niches...