History of Computer Languages
Monday, September 24, 2007 at 10:50PM
Randy in design, history, interface, internet, poster, software, timeline, web


O'Reilly has created a poster showing the 50-year history of computer languages from 1954 to 2004, available as a PDF. They have also been giving away copies of the posters at O'Reilly conferences. I love the links shown where older languages split or combined to create the newer languages over time.

I look back around 1990 when I was programming in college and see Fortran V, C++ and the birth of Visual Basic. I remember having to convince my engineering professors to let me program assignments in C++ instead of Fortran.

The original diagram was created by Éric Lévénez. Although O'Reilly is not updating the poster, Eric is keeping his original diagram up to date on levenez.com.

Article originally appeared on Cool Infographics (http://coolinfographics.squarespace.com/).
See website for complete article licensing information.