Tony Brooker, the mathematician and computer scientist who designed the programming language for the world’s first commercial computer, died on Nov. 20 at a nursing home in Hexham, England. Dropping in unannounced, he introduced himself to Alan Turing, a founding father of the computer age, who at the time was the lab’s deputy director. When Mr. Brooker described his own research at the University of Cambridge, he later recalled, Mr. Turing said, “Well, we can always employ someone like you.” Soon they were colleagues. Mr. Brooker joined the Manchester lab in October 1951, just after it installed a new machine called the Ferranti Mark 1. His job, he told the British Library in an interview in 2010, was to make the Mark 1 “usable.”

Source: New York Times December 13, 2019 21:45 UTC