THE LIVING ARCHIVE

From punched cards to autonomous collaborators: the ideas, people, languages and systems that taught machines to follow—and increasingly interpret—human intent.

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Tag: univac

John Mauchly and Short Code: Programming Above Raw Machine Instructions

John Mauchly's Short Code idea and William Schmitt's implementations for BINAC and UNIVAC explored whether mathematical problems could be expressed in a compact interpreted notation rather than hand-written machine instructions.

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Betty Holberton and SORT/MERGE: Automating Routine Programming on UNIVAC

Betty Holberton's UNIVAC sort-merge generator took file specifications and produced the program needed to perform sorting and merging, an early demonstration that computers could help write programs.

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