The National Museum of Computing's Honorary Fellowship Programme acknowledges outstanding individuals who have made a significant and lasting contribution to the fields of computing and technology.
Computer scientist, Mike Woodger - a powerful force behind modern computer programming languages and software engineering - has been named a TNMOC Honorary Fellow, recognising individuals who’ve played an extraordinarily influential role shaping modern British computing.
With a career spanning decades, Mike - who celebrated his 100th birthday last month - was a key contributor to the development of two important computer programming languages, Algol 60 and Ada. In both languages he and his fellow contributors created concepts to enable the construction of safe and reliable software systems and to make it easier for one programmer to build on the work of another, composing complex software systems out of reusable modules.
Among Mike’s many accomplishments:
Enabling the practical application of Pilot ACE, one of Britain’s first digital computers that was designed by Alan Turing and built at The National Physical Laboratory. Mike worked closely with Turing on ACE and wrote a suite of sophisticated mathematical routines to solve difficult scientific problems. His routines allowed application programmers to code for the problem they wanted to solve - helping them work faster and more efficiently.
Part of the team that created Algol 60. This was the first programming language to introduce the concepts of structured programming, procedures as data types and recursion found popular languages today such as Java and Python. These features help developers to build large-scale software systems that are safe, secure and reliable.
Played a Leading role in the design of Green that became Ada - an advanced programming language deployed widely in mission-critical, embedded systems and adopted as a standard by the US Department of Defense. Ada added concepts to the idea of Algol that included building large systems out of reusable software modules and the ability to execute and coordinate multiple tasks concurrently. These ideas are present in all today’s major programming languages.
For both Algol 60 and Ada, as a principal author and editor of the defining documents Mike became known as a “technical writing artist.”
This is a Virtual online event which will be livestreamed and recorded
Please see below for further information.
Online Attendance Includes:
Access to the livestream of the Awards Ceremony to witness Mike Woodger being presented with his Honorary Fellowship and his subsequent response, including a short question and answer session.
For any queries or further information please contact Jacqui Garrad at museum@tnmoc.org. Alternatively, you can contact the Museum via telephone on 01908 374708.
