ALGOL 60 was the first programming language to be designed completely from the bottom-up by computer scientists. It came about in large part because IBM, the owner of the FORTRAN programming language that was created in 1957, refused to relinquish proprietary control over what it considered to be its sole property. This lack of freedom in developing FORTRAN forced the scientific computing community of the late 1950s to seek to develop another language, which would improve on FORTRAN and remedy its problems, and yet be free of the shackles that corporate ownership entailed.

Early programming languages were highly machine-specific. Quite a few of them would only run on hardware built by a specific manufacturer--for instance, FORTRAN would only run on IBM's machines. A client who purchased the machine from a hardware manufacturer would also be obliged to purchase the compiler for that language only from that manufacturer, so as to...