Tony Brooker

Computer scientist

TONY BROOKER, who has died at 94, was a scientist who while working at Manchester University in the 1950s under the mathematician and wartime code breaker Alan Turing, produced one of the earliest high-level computer languages.

He had taken over from Turing the task of writing programming manuals, and it was his experience with what he considered to be the university’s tedious coding conventions that led him to devise the Mark 1 Autocode, probably the world’s first language of its type to be made publicly available.

Autocodes were simplified coding systems intended to make programming easier for users.

Mathematicians and engineers were used to a different notation system, he explained. “They wanted ways of translating engineering formulas into machine language, and that’s essentially what the Mark 1 Autocode offered.

“The average user wasn’t interested in programming itself ... they just wanted an answer.”

Born in Fulham, London, Brooker was educated at Emanuel School in Battersea and graduated in mathematics from Imperial College. He returned there two years later as assistant lecturer.

His first computer project was the construction of a fast multiplier unit from electromechanical relays. His work was

incorporated into the Imperial College Computing Engine. By 1949, he had moved to Cambridge University to work on software for one of the first British computers, the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator, or EDSAC. He moved to Manchester in 1951, and went on to develop code for the Atlas computer, in 1962 considered the most powerful in the world. He also originated the idea of the compiler, a programming tool still in use today. In 1967 he moved to Essex University to establish a computer centre and an undergraduate course in computer science. After retirement in 1988 he continued to programme and was also a keen sailor. His wife, Vera, died last year, and he is survived by their three sons.