Short Code
Short Code was born into a world where programming resembled electrical engineering more than code writing as we conceive it today. In the late 1940s, computing was in its infancy with monumental machines filling entire rooms for computing power that now seems laughable.
The story begins in the laboratories of the Moore School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. It was there that John Mauchly, a physicist who had transitioned to electronics, worked from 1941 on a military project aimed at calculating ballistic tables. Faced with the limitations of calculators, he envisioned a fully electronic machine: ENIAC.
This colossal machine, commissioned in 1946, executed 5,000 additions per second—an unprecedented technical achievement. ENIAC, however, suffered from a flaw: the absence of a stored program. Each calculation required manually modifying circuit connections, a tedious task that could take several days.
To overcome this constraint, Mauchly and his collaborator J. Presper Eckert designed EDVAC in 1944, incorporating the concept of a program stored in memory. Their departure from the university in 1946, following disagreements over intellectual property, delayed the project, which was not completed until 1951. Mauchly then proposed, in July 1949, a more accessible language than machine code: Short Code, initially named Brief Code.
Short Code stood out for its conceptual simplicity. Rather than writing directly in binary, programmers used mathematical expressions. The language supported floating-point numbers, variables, conditional jumps, and calls to subroutines stored separately. The UNIVAC manual illustrated this innovative syntax with examples such as:
This approach, though rudimentary by today’s standards, represented a break from previous methods. Programs remained complex, however, and had to be manually translated into machine language—the compiler did not yet exist. Tests showed that code written in Short Code executed approximately 50 times slower than an equivalent program in machine language, arousing skepticism among many specialists. Despite these limitations, Short Code marked a decisive milestone. For the first time, the algorithm took shape independently of the machine, enabling the emergence of more advanced languages such as Fortran (1957) or Algol (1958). The concepts it introduced—mathematical expressions, variables, branching, subroutines—became the foundations of modern programming.
Mauchly and Eckert’s work was not limited to Short Code. After ENIAC and EDVAC, they created BINAC (Binary Automatic Computer, 1949), the first operational stored-program computer, then UNIVAC I (1951), the first commercial computer in history. William Schmitt developed a prototype of Short Code on BINAC, later adapted to UNIVAC I, and finally to UNIVAC II. By founding the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation in 1946, they were the first to attempt to commercialize these extraordinary machines, whose usefulness remained mysterious to the general public.
Short Code, by partially freeing developers from hardware complexity, helped democratize programming and accelerated the growth of the computer industry. Seventy years after Mauchly’s work, the quest for expressive, safe, and efficient languages, such as Rust for example, remains at the heart of concerns for computer scientists of the 21st century.