Hanford Mark II(ID:2793/han004)

Report generating language from GE Hanford 

Report generating language from GE Hanford

from Fry and Sibley:
"The capability was extended in 1957 by the development of a report and file maintenance generator (MARK II)"

Places
Related languages
Hanford Mark I => Hanford Mark II   Evolution of
Hanford Mark II => 9PAC   Evolution of
Hanford Mark II => COBOL   Influence
Hanford Mark II => COGENT   Extension of
Hanford Mark II => FACT   Influence
Hanford Mark II => SURGE   Evolution of
References:
  • Asch, Alfred. 1959 July 29. Minutes of Committee Meeting on Data Systems Languages Held at Bureau of Standards, June 23-24. (Cited in Sammet 1978) view details Extract: Languages examined by CODASYL
    An important decision of the committee was to agree (Asch, 1959) "that the following language systems and programming aids would be reviewed by the committee: AIMACO, Comtran [sic], Flowmatic [sic], Autocoder III, SURGE, Fortran, RCA 501 Assembler, Report Generator (GE Hanford) , APG-I (Dupont)"
  • Bachman, Charles W. "On a generalized language for file organization and manipulation" view details Extract: History
    Historically, the whole area goes back to the General Electric Hanford system of Report and File Maintenance Generators for the IBM 702. This led to the development by SHARE of 9Pac for the IBM 709 and SURGE for the 704. These were nonprocedural languages with implied file maintenance and report generation func- tions. There were neither read nor write commands in these languages; they were completely declarative. The assumption was that if you ran the report generator you would get reports; if you ran the file maintenance generator you expected to maintain the file. The Honeywell FACT compiler successfully extracted many of the file disciplines from SURGE and imbedded them in a procedural language with declarative statements defining record structures.

    These ideas, that were used on a one-dimensional scale (for operating on magnetic tapes) in the 702 Report Generator, SURGE, 9PAc and FACT, were expanded to handle an n-dimensional or graph type structure on a random access device in the GE Integrated Data Store. Today's discussion is concerned with a back-fitting of the Integrated Data Store's concepts of data declarations and record processing commands to serially stored files, to create a unified generalized approach for all classes of data devices.

          in [ACM] CACM 9(03) March 1966 includes proceedings of the ACM Programming Languages and Pragmatics Conference, San Dimas, California, August 1965 view details
  • Fry, James P.; Sibley, Edgar H. "Evolution of Data-Base Management Systems" view details
          in [ACM] ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR) 8(1) March 1976 view details
  • Sammet, Jean E. "The early history of COBOL" view details Abstract: This paper discusses the early history of COBOL, starting with the May 1959 meeting in the Pentagon which established the Short Range Committee which defined the initial version of COBOL, and continuing through the creation of COBOL 61. The paper gives a detailed description of the committee activities leading to the publication of the first official version, namely COBOL 60. The major inputs to COBOL are discussed, and there is also a description of how and why some of the technical decisions in COBOL were made. Finally, there is a brief “after the fact” evaluation, and some indication of the implication of COBOL on current and future languages.

          in SIGPLAN Notices 14(04) April 1979 including The first ACM SIGPLAN conference on History of programming languages (HOPL) Los Angeles, CA, June 1-3, 1978 view details