Tony Brooker

Who is Tony Brooker?

Ralph Anthony "Tony" Brooker is a British academic who was a computer scientist known for developing the Mark 1 Autocode.

He was educated at Emanuel School and graduated in Mathematics from Imperial College in 1945 and returned there in 1947 as Assistant Lecturer. His first computer project was the construction of a fast multiplier unit from electro-mechanical relays. This was taken over by K. D. Tocher and incorporated into ICCE, the Imperial College Computing Engine based on the same technology. By then Tony had moved to the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory to work for Maurice Wilkes on software development for EDSAC.

In October 1951 Tony joined the Computing Machine Laboratory at Manchester University, where he took over from Alan Turing the task of writing programming manuals and running a user service on the Ferranti Mark 1 computer. It was his experience with the rather tedious Manchester machine-coding conventions that led him to devise what was probably the world's first publicly available High-Level Language. This was the Mark 1 Autocode available from March 1954 and therefore about two years ahead of the first Fortran compiler.