The History of the ALGOL Effort

Tim McCaffrey

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As you said it is *a* history. I did not have the intention to be complete: I have tried to write an historical argument about the importance of the ALGOL effort for the development of computer science. The stack machines of Burroughs ( and others, by the way) suited for the translation of ALGOL did not fit into my history. There are more topics I have not treated, like the history of ALGOL 68 after the publication of the ALGOL 68 report, or the various ALGOL translator writing efforts and use of these compilers.

There are reasons why I did not: the most important being the sources I had access to. I only have used (scientific) publications meaning that much information from personal archives, interviews, and the like do not appear in my history.

The same goes for the various publications of different ALGOL translators (there were many of them). Because the huge amount of publications on similar but different translators based on certain early developments in ALGOL translation, I decided to skip that part because I was unable to treat it completely. Just choosing some implementations to describe would be too random to be justified.

And more importantly, as said before, I wanted to do research on the importance of the ALGOL effort *for the development of computer science*. These many efforts to translate ALGOL or these hardware-related efforts were, in my opinion, by far not the most important aspects of the ALGOL effort for the development of computer science. Writing history is in the first place selection: it is impossible to treat everything, you have to select those parts that are important for your argument, to get your message through.

And that is the great thing about history, there is no *one* final and complete history. Everyone can write a different history, and the combination of all these histories written from different perspectives is the true value of the art of history.

-- HT de Beer