tl;dr “Foo” and “bar” as metasyntactic variables were popularised by MIT and DEC, the first references are in work on LISP and PDP-1 and Project MAC from 1964 onwards. Many of these people were in MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club, where we find the first documented use of “foo” in tech circles in 1959 (and … Read more
I will try to remember what I said, but none of the answers so far are correct (every one of them was done in the 60s and 70s before the commercialization of PCs in the 80s). However, we could start all over and try to think of new inventions in computing since the 1980s.
There are a number of options, the simplest, of course, being to simply record all versions independently. For a site like Stack Overflow, where posts aren’t usually edited very many times, this is appropriate. However for something like Wikipedia, one needs to be more clever to save space. In the case of Wikipedia, pages are … Read more
Going a little further with nos’s comments, I turned up a scanned version of the GE-635 Programming Manual, and found the following in the section on the macro assembler: The GE-625/635 Macro Assembler is being provided to give the professional programmers some of the conveniences of a compiler and the flexibility of an Assembler. […] … Read more
Brian Kernighan actually wrote the first “hello, world” program as part of the documentation for the BCPL programming language developed by Martin Richards. BCPL was used while C was being developed at Bell Labs a few years before the publication of Kernighan and Ritchie’s C book in 1972. As part of the research for a … Read more