Speedcoding

Speedcoding, Speedcode or SpeedCo was the first high-level programming language^[a] created for an IBM computer.^[1] The language was developed by John W. Backus in 1953 for the IBM 701 to support computation with floating point numbers.^[2]

The idea arose from the difficulty of programming the IBM SSEC machine when Backus was hired to calculate astronomical positions in early 1950.^[3] The speedcoding system was an interpreter and focused on ease of use at the expense of system resources. It provided pseudo-instructions for common mathematical functions: logarithms, exponentiation, and trigonometric operations. The resident software analyzed pseudo-instructions one by one and called the appropriate subroutine. Speedcoding was also the first implementation of decimal input/output operations. Although it substantially reduced the effort of writing many jobs, the running time of a program that was written with the help of Speedcoding was usually ten to twenty times that of machine code.^[4] The interpreter took 310 memory words, about 30% of the memory available on a 701.^[1]

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