If you had a PC in the 2010s, you probably owned a copy of Purble Place. The gaudy kids' game came with every copy of Windows Vista and 7. It was a simple, three-title package: Purble Pairs was a basic tile memory game; Purble Shop had the player design a mystery character using logic and deduction; and the last game of Comfy Cakes had kids playing line cook for the Purble Chef while juggling orders on a conveyor belt. And for many online teens, the legacy of these games easily equals that of Minesweeper and Solitaire, the more venerable pack-in games of PCs past. Yet nobody knows who made it.

In the early 1960s, the languages Fortran (John Backus, IBM) for scientific, and Cobol (Jean Sammet, IBM, and DoD) for commercial applications dominated. Programs were written on paper, then punched on cards, and one waited a day for the results. Programming languages were recognized as essential aids and accelerators of the programming process. In 1960, an international committee published the language Algol 60.1 It was the first time a language was defined by concisely formulated constructs and by a precise, formal syntax. Two years later, it was recognized that a few corrections and improvements were needed. Mainly, however, the range of applications should be widened, because Algol 60 was intended for scientific calculations (numerical mathematics) only.