Speak, memory...

In September 1967, Aad van Wijngaarden, the director of the Mathematical Centre in Amsterdam, asked me to join the ongoing project to define a successor to Algol 60. I had just finished 18 months in the Dutch Army, and was looking forward to the resumption of a carefree life, working on Natural Language Processing. Van Wijngaarden’s eye fell on me for a number of reasons: I was steeped in the spirit and implementation of Algol, well-versed in two-level grammars and I knew everything there was to know about operating systems and I/O, having just completed a vast Fortran program on an IBM 7094 under IBSYS that made use of all its 16 tape drives. In this way I became one of the Authors of Algol 68, and a participant in one of the formative events of our profession — the making of Algol 68. In this note I will try to give you an eyewitness account. I am not a historian, and have kept very few notes from this period, but the Informal Minutes of the Tirrenia [7] and North Berwick [8] meetings bring back many memories. Let me describe to you four parties, the Editor, the Authors, the Committee and the Computing Community, taking part in a cosmic struggle for Truth. The period i