HT de Beer
August 2006
download the whole history of the ALGOL effort as a pdf file (1.1 megabytes)
I want to clarify the term ``ALGOL effort''. The ALGOL effort did, at first, not exist as an official institution. Later in the development of the ALGOL effort, it became more official and institutionalised, but at the start it was just an idea. Some computer scientists wanted to create a new universal programming language to write algorithms in. The effort that was undertaken to create this programming language, and everything related to it, is what I call the ``ALGOL effort''.
The ALGOL effort started somewhere in the mid-1950s. Where it ends is debatable: did it end in 1988 when the last ALGOL Bulletin was published, or did it end after the maintenance period of ALGOL 60? I have chosen the publication of the ALGOL 68 report as the end of the ALGOL effort. After the publication of this report in late 1969 the official developments on ALGOL did not end. The spirit of the ALGOL effort, however, was broken with the publication of a Minority Report.0 More than half of the members of Working Group 2.1 responsible for the development of ALGOL 68 did not agree with the final result. With this disagreement the idea of an universal language was no longer part of the ALGOL effort.
0 Dijkstra et al., ‘Minority Report’, ALGOL Bull. 31 (1970)