Software and the Rise of Personal Computing

As computers grew more capable through the 1950s, the tedious and error-prone task of programming directly in machine code or assembly language became a major bottleneck, spurring the development of higher-level programming languages that could be translated automatically into instructions a machine could execute. FORTRAN, short for "Formula Translation," was developed by a team led by John Backus at IBM and released in 1957 as the first widely used high-level language, designed primarily for scientific and engineering calculations and still in active use in some scientific computing contexts today. COBOL, short for "Common Business-Oriented Language," followed in 1959, developed by a committee effort within the Conference on Data Systems Languages that drew heavily on earlier work by Grace Hopper's team, and was designed specifically for business, financial, and administrative data processing, with a syntax deliberately intended to resemble plain English. Later decades saw a proliferation of programming languages built for different purposes, including LISP, developed by John McCarthy in 1958 for symbolic and artificial intelligence research; BASIC, created by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz at Dartmouth College in 1964 to make programming accessible to students; and C, developed by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs in the early 1970s, which became foundational to operating systems and remains highly influential in language design today.