

RED REFERENCE MANUAL:

The first phase of the contest to design DoD-1 resulted in the submission of 16 language proposals. From those, four were chosen to be funded for an initial design. Those four included:

Red: Intermetrics (Ben Brosgol)

Blue: SofTech (John Goodenough)

Green: CII-Honeywell-Bull (Jean Ichbiah)

Yellow: Stanford Research International (SRI) (Jay Spitzen)

At the end of this phase of the competition, two languages were chosen to be refined and completed in the next phase - Red and Green.

Rather than simply refining their first effort, called REDL, Intermetrics chose to use the last phase for a radical redesign, resulting in an entirely new language, RED. When the Green language was chosen as the winning language, Intermetrics supported the common language effort and both Red languages disappeared.

On this 30th anniversary of the runoff contest, it seems appropriate to allow RED its place in language history.

While the language was designed by a large group of people at Intermetrics, the reference book was written by John Nestor and Mary Van Deusen.