Recent posts

Computing's Woodstock - Los Alamos 1976

In 1976, Los Alamos hosted the International History of Computing Conference where the pioneering efforts of computing were discussed, often by the pioneers themselves. The Computer History Museum has posted videos from the talks, which cover important machines, languages, people, institutions, and practices invented in the first 30 years of the craft. Dag Spicer, the senior curator at CHM, has written a blog post giving an overview and background of the event.

Dawn of Computer Music

The first song composed and played by a computer was The Silver Scale on May 17, 1957. This video discusses the physics and hardware necessary for this invention, as well as the domain specific language, MUSIC-V, that arose for efficient programming of sound waves.

Fifty years of strings: Language design and the string datatype

Strings are a fundamental data type in programming languages, but their representation, functionality, and suitability for multi-lingual processing have changed over time. This article looks at the major changes in language design over the first fifty years.

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Format Specifiers

Programming languages use format specifiers to control the formatting of numbers and text. We look at their invention in FORTRAN I, adoption in BCPL, and three innovative attempts to include them in ALGOL60.