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Tony Brooker, the mathematician and computer scientist who designed the programming language for the world’s first commercial computer, died on November 20 at a nursing home in Hexham, England.
Mr. Brooker had been immersed in early computer research at the University of Cambridge when one day, on his way home from a mountain-climbing trip in North Wales, he stopped at the University of Manchester to tour its computer lab. It was there that he met the legendary Professor Alan Turing, a founding father of the computer age.
Mr. Brooker joined the Manchester lab in October 1951, just after it installed a new machine called the Ferranti Mark 1. His job was to make the Mark 1 “usable”. Professor Turing had written a user’s manual, but it was far from intuitive. To program the machine, engineers had to write in binary code — patterns made up of 0s and 1s — and they had to write them backward, from right to left, because this was the way the hardware read them.
It was “extremely neat and very clever but pretty meaningless and very unfriendly”, Mr. Brooker said.
In the months that followed, Mr. Brooker wrote a language he called Autocode, based on ordinary numbers and letters. It allowed anyone to program the machine — not just the limited group of trained engineers who understood the hardware.
This marked the beginning of what were later called “high-level” programming languages — languages that provide increasingly simple and intuitive ways of giving commands to computers, from the IBM mainframes of the 1960s to the PCs of the 1980s to the iPhones of today.
As the decades passed, this idea helped expand what computers were capable of. Without high-level languages there would be no App Store, and no World Wide Web.
Ralph Anthony Brooker was born on September, 22, 1925 and died on November 20, 2019. He was one of the last survivors of Alan Turing’s generation of computer pioneers.
Alan Turing met Mr. Brooker on a mountain-climbing trip.