History of programing languages

BASIC

Stands for Beginner´s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. It is a high-level programming language designed in 1964 by John George Kemeny and Thomas Eugene Kurtz at Dartmouth College. Now BASIC is used in Microsoft’s visual basic package and RealBASIC to Mac OS computers.

Visual Basic

Visual Basic, is developed from BASIC, by Microsoft for it’s COM programming model. The final release was version 6 in 1998. It gives the application development of graphical user interface applications, access to databases using Data Access Objects, Remote Data Objects, or ActiveX Data Objects, and creation of ActiveX controls and objects. Scripting languages such as VBA and VBScript are syntactically similar to Visual Basic, but works differently.

A programmer can put together an application using only Visual Basic.

Pascal

The name is after French mathematic called Blaise Pascal. It is a programming language developed by Nicklaus Wirth in 1968-1970. The language is based on Alyd, a algorithmic language (made in DK :D), that was designed for teaching use. In 1972 Per Hansen (DK!) made Concurrent Pascal for programs and systems with processor, later Anders Hejlsberg (also from DK, haha :D) the language Compas Pascal and later Poly Pascal. In 1983 Turbo Pascal is made, a Pascal translator.

COBOL

COBOL, short for COmmon Business-Oriented Language. It is one of the oldest programming languages. COBOL was created by a committee of researchers from private industry, universities, and government in 1959. It was inspired by the FLOW-MATIC language invented by Grace Hopper, after often referred to as "the mother of the COBOL language."

In 1968, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) developed a standard form of the language, where they fixed some mistakes.  

In 1974, they made a new version with some new features that the 1968 version didn’t have.

In 1985, ANSI another version that had notably structured language constructs,  including END-IF, END-PERFORM, END-READ.

And last in 2002 there was made an object-oriented COBOL.

Fortran

Fortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is made for numeric computation and scientific computing. IBM developed it at their campus in south San Jose, California in the 1950s. So it is one of the older programming languages too. It is one of the most popular languages in high-performance computing, and is the language used for programs in the world's fastest supercomputers.

The versions with success that was made alter was FORTRAN 77 - array programming, modular programming, Fortran 90 / 95 - object-oriented programming, and Fortran 2003 - object-oriented and generic programming.