Computer (occupation)The term "computer", in use from the early 17th century (the first known written reference dates from 1613), meant "one who computes": a person performing mathematical calculations, before electronic computers became commercially available. Alan Turing described the "human computer" as someone who is "supposed to be following fixed rules; he has no authority to deviate from them in any detail." Teams of people, often women from the late nineteenth century onwards, were used to undertake long and often tedious calculations; the work was divided so that this could be done in parallel.
Computer scienceComputer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to applied disciplines (including the design and implementation of hardware and software). Though more often considered an academic discipline, computer science is closely related to computer programming. Algorithms and data structures are central to computer science.
FortranFortran (ˈfɔrtræn; formerly FORTRAN) is a general-purpose, compiled imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. Fortran was originally developed by IBM in the 1950s for scientific and engineering applications, and subsequently came to dominate scientific computing. It has been in use for over seven decades in computationally intensive areas such as numerical weather prediction, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, geophysics, computational physics, crystallography and computational chemistry.
ALGOL 68ALGOL 68 (short for Algorithmic Language 1968) is an imperative programming language that was conceived as a successor to the ALGOL 60 programming language, designed with the goal of a much wider scope of application and more rigorously defined syntax and semantics. The complexity of the language's definition, which runs to several hundred pages filled with non-standard terminology, made compiler implementation difficult and it was said it had "no implementations and no users".
Modula-2Modula-2 is a structured, procedural programming language developed between 1977 and 1985/8 by Niklaus Wirth at ETH Zurich. It was created as the language for the operating system and application software of the Lilith personal workstation. It was later used for programming outside the context of the Lilith. Wirth viewed Modula-2 as a successor to his earlier programming languages Pascal and Modula.
