Many of us have heard of OE Sir Tim Berners Lee who invented the World Wide Web, but the tremendous achievements of computer scientist and educationist Tony Brooker are less well publicised. Tony died on 20th November 2019 at the age of 94.
OE Tony Brooker invented the first practical computer programming language, worked alongside Alan Turing in the 1950s and was the founding professor of Computer Science at the University of Essex, establishing its reputation for research in programming languages, artificial intelligence and robotics.
Tony left Emanuel in 1940 and won a scholarship to read Mathematics at Imperial College, graduating with a first-class honours degree in 1946. He took up his first academic post in 1947 at Imperial College, during which time he helped to build their ‘computing engine’. In 1949, he started working as a research assistant at the Cambridge University mathematical laboratory where he was responsible for its analogue computer. In May 1949, the laboratory completed Edsac, the world’s first electronic digital computer. Tony helped to produce a scheme to simplify mathematical programming of the computer. His interests at Cambridge progressed from building computer hardware to addressing the problem of how users would tell the computer what they wanted it to do, effectively developing what we now call computer software.
Tony became a lecturer at Manchester University in 1951, where Alan Turing was deputy director of the laboratory. As the Manchester computer was so complex and difficult to programme, Tony created a simplified programming system, the Manchester Autocode, to make the computer quickly and easily accessible to the department and later developed the Mercury Autocode for the university’s next computer.
Tony then went on to create the machine code for the most powerful computer ever at the time, ‘The Atlas’, an early (and massive) predecessor of our home PC.
In the 1960s, Tony had a key role in the creation and early advancement of Computer Science as an academic subject and helped inaugurate the UK’s first Computer Science degree at Manchester University and later Essex University, where he became the founding Chair of Computer Science. He also encouraged free thinking and experiments in interconnected subjects such as robotics and experiments into artificial intelligence.
Read the full obituary on The Guardian here.