Conference chairman's opening remarks

Welcome to the Second History of Programming Languages Conference. My name is Jan Lee; I'm the general chairman of this conference. We started thinking about this conference in 1978; that was the year of the first History of Programming Languages Conference (HOPL-I), chaired by Jean Sammet. It had been enormously successful and we were enthused enough at that time to begin thinking about our next history conference. We had many suggestions, perhaps the most serious of which was to consider the history of operating systems. In fact, we even had a name for it, HOOS. But it was obvious that the history of programming languages was continuing to happen, even in 1978 as we held that meeting. Pascal had begun to replace FORTRAN as the language of choice in computer science education, and the Department of Defense was talking about an all-purpose new language. There were programming developments that we left out of that meeting simply because there was not enough time to cover them. There were already things happening that would clearly be on the agenda of the next meeting.