A nice tribute page here by Bill Foote on his parents, both programmers in the 60s, possibly meeting during the JOVIAL project.
My parents Kay and Ed Foote were both JOVIAL programmers. My parents may have even gotten to know each other over JOVIAL; my father was on the team that created it, and my mother started using it in 1961.
By the way, the acronym has come to mean “Jules’ Own Version of IAL,” but within the team it originally stood for “Just Our Version of IAL.” IAL stands for “International Algorithmic Language,” (or maybe it’s “Algebraic”). IAL was an early name for ALGOL.
Linked within, another personal history from an early programmer:
- Norm Sandin’s reflections on his career at SDC and beyond.
At SDC, I went through the training with flying colors. However, just at the end of the class, SDC lost the Ft. Huachuca bid, and suddenly found themselves with a glut of untried, unproven, junior programmers, with two more classes one and two months behind mine. SDC fired the class that had just started, allowed the one that was more than half done to complete and then fired them, and promised us that they would try to place us. About half of our class was placed. My performance in the class gave me perhaps the best assignment of all. I was put to work on a JOVIAL compiler to be used interactively with the first time-sharing system in the world, then under development at SDC in competition with MIT.
Via this announcement of a new HP-16C emulation.
