History of Programming Languages

High-Level Languages

• FORTRAN (Formua TRANslator) was developed by IBM in 1954-1957 for complex mathematical computations and scientific/engineering applications.
• COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) was developed in 1959 for commercial applications, offering precise and efficient manipulation of large amounts of data.

Pascal and Structured Programming

• Pascal was developed by Professor Niklaus Wirth for academic use.
• Structured programming emerged in the 1960s as a disciplined approach to writing programs, making them clear, easy to test, debug, and modify.
• Pascal is an example of a language that supports structured programming, developed in 1971 by Niklaus Wirth.
• Ada was developed in the 1970s-early 1980s by the US Department of Defense (DoD) for multitasking, allowing programmers to specify many activities to run in parallel.

Object Technology

• Objects are reusable software components that model real-world items, such as date, time, paycheck, invoice, audio, video, file, and record objects.
• Objects make software more understandable, organized, and easier to maintain, favoring modularity and software reuse through libraries like MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes) and Rogue Wave.

C++ Environment

• A C++ system consists of a program-development environment, language, and C++ Standard Library.
• The phases of a C++ program include editing, preprocessing, compiling, and linking, resulting in an executable program.

Evolution of Operating Systems

• Multiprogramming allows many jobs or tasks to share computer resources, operating "simultaneously."
• Timesharing emerged in the 1960s as a special case of multiprogramming, where users access computers through terminals, with the operating system performing small portions of each user's job before moving on to the next user.
• Timesharing provides an advantage of almost immediate responses to user requests.

Personal Computing, Distributed Computing, and Client/Server Computing

• Personal computers, such as the Apple Computer (1977) and IBM Personal Computer (1981), are economical and "standalone" units.
• Computer networks, including local area networks (LANs), connect computers over telephone lines.
• Distributed computing distributes an organization's computing over networks, and client/server computing involves file servers offering shared programs and data, with client computers accessing them across the network.
• Examples of client/server computing include UNIX, Linux, and Microsoft's Window-based systems.

Learn about the development and evolution of programming languages, including FORTRAN, COBOL, and Pascal, and their applications in science, engineering, and business.