Notes:
The title of my talk refers to the Rosetta stone, so I owe you a picture of it here. You can see it in the British Museum and of course it is very important in that it contains the same text in two languages and three different alphabets so it was key to the deciphering of hieroglyphs.
The metaphor will be of course that the Gier Algol compiler code occupies a similarly central place in the relatively brief but fast changing history of computer software. I hope I'll be able to show you how meaningful and even visionary this software was and how we are still decoding the lessons from it today.
But to appreciate any artifact we have to put it first in historical context.