Tony Brooker
Encyclopedia
Tony Brooker graduated in Mathematics
from Imperial College in 1945 and returned there in 1947 as Assistant Lecturer. His first computer project was the construction of a fast multiplier unit from electro-mechanical relays. This was taken over by Professor K D Tocher and incorporated into ICCE, the Imperial College Computing Engine based on the same technology. By then (1949) Tony had moved to the Computing Laboratory at Cambridge to work for Professor Maurice Wilkes on software development for EDSAC
.
In October 1951 Tony joined the Computing Machine Laboratory at Manchester University, where he took over from Alan Turing
the task of writing programming manuals and running a user service on the Ferranti Mark 1 computer. It was his experience with the rather tedious Manchester machine-coding conventions that led him to devise what was probably the world's first publicly-available High-Level Language. This was the Mark 1 Autocode available from March 1954 and therefore about two years ahead of the first Fortran
compiler
.
Throughout the 1950s Tony led a group at Manchester working on the theoretical underpinnings of compilers. This culminated in the Compiler Compiler, a seminal idea first presented at a British Computer Society Conference in July 1960 by Brooker and Morris. This was subsequently implemented on the Ferranti
ATLAS and used for high-level language development. The ATLAS was regarded as the world's most powerful computer when it was brought into service in December 1962.
In the mid-1960s Tony helped to inaugurate the UK's first Computer Science degree course at Manchester. He moved to Essex University in 1967 to take up the University's founding Chair of Computer Science. The first Essex Computer Science graduates obtained their degrees in the summer of 1970.
Mathematics
Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...
from Imperial College in 1945 and returned there in 1947 as Assistant Lecturer. His first computer project was the construction of a fast multiplier unit from electro-mechanical relays. This was taken over by Professor K D Tocher and incorporated into ICCE, the Imperial College Computing Engine based on the same technology. By then (1949) Tony had moved to the Computing Laboratory at Cambridge to work for Professor Maurice Wilkes on software development for EDSAC
EDSAC
Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator was an early British computer. The machine, having been inspired by John von Neumann's seminal First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, was constructed by Maurice Wilkes and his team at the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory in England...
.
In October 1951 Tony joined the Computing Machine Laboratory at Manchester University, where he took over from Alan Turing
Alan Turing
Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS , was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of "algorithm" and "computation" with the Turing machine, which played a...
the task of writing programming manuals and running a user service on the Ferranti Mark 1 computer. It was his experience with the rather tedious Manchester machine-coding conventions that led him to devise what was probably the world's first publicly-available High-Level Language. This was the Mark 1 Autocode available from March 1954 and therefore about two years ahead of the first Fortran
Fortran
Fortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing...
compiler
Compiler
A compiler is a computer program that transforms source code written in a programming language into another computer language...
.
Throughout the 1950s Tony led a group at Manchester working on the theoretical underpinnings of compilers. This culminated in the Compiler Compiler, a seminal idea first presented at a British Computer Society Conference in July 1960 by Brooker and Morris. This was subsequently implemented on the Ferranti
Ferranti
Ferranti or Ferranti International plc was a UK electrical engineering and equipment firm that operated for over a century from 1885 until it went bankrupt in 1993. Known primarily for defence electronics, the Company was once a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index but ceased trading in 1993.The...
ATLAS and used for high-level language development. The ATLAS was regarded as the world's most powerful computer when it was brought into service in December 1962.
In the mid-1960s Tony helped to inaugurate the UK's first Computer Science degree course at Manchester. He moved to Essex University in 1967 to take up the University's founding Chair of Computer Science. The first Essex Computer Science graduates obtained their degrees in the summer of 1970.
External links
- http://hopl.murdoch.edu.au/showperson.prx?PeopleID=115
- http://www.computer50.org/mark1/gac1.html#brooker
- http://www.computer50.org/mark1/gethomas/manchester_autocodes.html
- Listen to an oral history interview with Tony Brooker - a life story interview recorded for An Oral History of British Science at the British Library