Ralph Anthony Brooker (22 September 1925 – 20 November 2019), was a British

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

known for developing the Mark 1 Autocode. He was educated at

Emanuel School Emanuel School is a private, co-educational day school in Battersea, south-west London. The school was founded in 1594 by Anne Sackville, Lady Dacre and Queen Elizabeth I and today occupies a 12-acre (4.9 ha) site close to Clapham Junction ...

and graduated in

Mathematics Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...

from

Imperial College Imperial College London, also known as Imperial, is a public research university in London, England. Its history began with Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria, who envisioned a cultural district in South Kensington that included museums ...

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 Sid Michaelson and K. D. Tocher and incorporated into ICCE, the Imperial College Computing Engine based on the same technology. By then (1949)Brooker had moved to the

University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory The Department of Computer Science and Technology, formerly the Computer Laboratory, is the computer science department of the University of Cambridge. it employed 56 faculty members, 45 support staff, 105 research staff, and about 205 researc ...

to work for

Maurice Wilkes Sir Maurice Vincent Wilkes (26 June 1913 – 29 November 2010) was an English computer scientist who designed and helped build the EDSAC, Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC), one of the earliest stored-program computers, and ...

software Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications. The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...

development for

EDSAC The Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) was an early British computer. Inspired by John von Neumann's seminal ''First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC'', the machine was constructed by Maurice Wilkes and his team at the Universit ...

. In October 1951 Brooker joined the Computing Machine Laboratory at

Manchester University The University of Manchester is a public university, public research university in Manchester, England. The main campus is south of Manchester city centre, Manchester City Centre on Wilmslow Road, Oxford Road. The University of Manchester is c ...

, where he took over from

Alan Turing Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist. He was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer ...

the task of writing programming manuals and running a user service on the

Ferranti Mark 1 The Ferranti Mark 1, also known as the Manchester Electronic Computer in its sales literature, and thus sometimes called the Manchester Ferranti, was produced by British electrical engineering firm Ferranti Ltd. It was the world's first commer ...

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 A high-level programming language is a programming language with strong abstraction from the details of the computer. In contrast to low-level programming languages, it may use natural language ''elements'', be easier to use, or may automate (or ...

. This was the Mark 1 Autocode available from March 1954 and therefore about two years ahead of the first Fortran

compiler In computing, a compiler is a computer program that Translator (computing), translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primaril ...

. Throughout the 1950s Brooker led a group at Manchester working on the theoretical underpinnings of compilers. This culminated in the

compiler-compiler In computer science, a compiler-compiler or compiler generator is a programming tool that creates a Parsing#Computer_languages, parser, interpreter (computer software), interpreter, or compiler from some form of formal description of a programm ...

, a seminal idea first presented at a British Computer Society Conference in July 1960 by Brooker and Derrick Morris. This was subsequently implemented on the

Ferranti Ferranti International PLC or simply Ferranti was a UK-based electrical engineering and equipment firm that operated for over a century, from 1885 until its bankruptcy in 1993. At its peak, Ferranti was a significant player in power grid system ...

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 Brooker helped to inaugurate the UK's first Computer Science degree course at Manchester. He moved to

Essex University The University of Essex is a public research university in Essex, England. Established by royal charter in 1965, it is one of the original plate glass universities. The university comprises three campuses in the county, in Southend-on-Sea and ...

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. He retired in 1988 and died on 20 November 2019 in Hexham.

References

External links

* https://web.archive.org/web/20080816195357/http://hopl.murdoch.edu.au/showperson.prx?PeopleID=115 * http://www.computer50.org/mark1/gac1.html#brooker * https://web.archive.org/web/20041031031946/http://www.computer50.org/mark1/gethomas/manchester_autocodes.html
Listen to an oral history interview with Tony Brooker
- a life story interview recorded fo
An Oral History of British Science
at the British Library {{DEFAULTSORT:Brooker, Tony 1925 births 2019 deaths British computer scientists Alumni of Imperial College London People from Fulham

Further reading

References

External links