1.1 The Environmental nd Personnel Setting

involved with the f irst JOVIAL project had been using included the JOHNNIAC (built at Rand Corporation), the IBM AN/FSQ-7 (for SAGE), 701, and 704. A few had worked with board wired calculators. Some had never programmed. For those using IBM, the 709 was the current machine. There were various other manufactur-ers at the time, some of whom do not exist today as computer manufacturers. The vacuum tube was stil l in vogue, Very large memo-r ies, either high speed direct access or peripheral storage, didn't exist, except for magnetic tape and drums on some computers. The f i rst large scale system which was built and main-tained by thousands of people was in the process of being installed after a considerable amount of effort, expense, and technological innovation. Called SAGE, it was a large real- t ime system (very large by 1958 standards). It had, among other things, an interesting and very val-uable (even by today's standards) utility system for assisting in development. This included the Communi-cation Pool. The Comm Pool's purpose was to permit the sharing of System Data among many programs by providing a centralized ata description. Programming for SAGE had been done in machine language, as was almost all programming up to that time. FORTRAN existed and had been in use for a few years, but use of higher level languages wasn't nearly as com-mon as the use of such languages today. Certainly the majority of people involved in compiler efforts at that time, and in part icular the initial JOVIAL language development and compiler effort, had almost no expe-r ience with such activities. I had had experience with the language and compiler called PACT (Project for Automatic Coding Techniques) which was developed and described in 1954-1955 (Melahn 1956). But actually this experience, largely because of the nature of that lan-guage and the computer the f irst version ran on (the IBM 701), was not particularly valuable for the develop-ment of languages in the ALGOL class. One of the significant hings that got the JOVIAL lan-guage and compiler work started was an art ic le o