First Compilers
Software for early computers was primarily written in assembly language. It is usually more productive for a programmer to use a high level language, and programs written in a high level language are able to be reused on different kinds of computers. Even so, it took a while for compilers to become established, because they generated code that did not perform as well as hand-written assembler, they were daunting development projects in their own right, and the very limited memory capacity of early computers created many technical problems for practical compiler implementations.
The first compiler was written by Grace Hopper, in 1952, for the A-0 System language. The term compiler was coined by Hopper. The FORTRAN team led by John W. Backus at IBM is generally credited as having introduced the first complete compiler, in 1957. The first FORTRAN compiler took 18 person-years to create.
The first ALGOL 58 compiler was completed by the end of 1958 by Friedrich L. Bauer, Hermann Bottenbruch, Heinz Rutishauser, and Klaus Samelson for the Z22 computer. Bauer et al. had been working on compiler technology for the Sequentielle Formelübersetzung (i.e. Sequential Formula Translation) in the previous years.
By 1960, an extended Fortran compiler, ALTAC, was available on the Philco 2000, so it is probable that a Fortran program was compiled for both IBM and Philco computer architectures in mid-1960. The first known demonstrated cross-platform high level language was COBOL. In a demonstration in December 1960, a COBOL program was compiled and executed on both the UNIVAC II and the RCA 501.
The COBOL compiler for the UNIVAC II was probably the first to be written in a high level language, namely FLOW-MATIC, by a team led by Grace Hopper.
Read more about this topic: History Of Compiler Construction