The president of the ARA, Ben Brosgol, has unearthed a part of Ada Prehistory, a document from June 1976 titled “A Common Programming Language for the Department of Defense – Background and Technical Requirements”. We’ve posted it in the AdaIC archives in the Policy and History section. You can access it directly at http://archive.adaic.com/pol-hist/history/Fisher-P-1191.pdf. (Warning: this is a 7.5 megabyte file.)

This report is a very early description of the process that led to Ada: it predates the language design competition. (Ben, for those of you who don’t know, was a principal designer for the runner-up language – Red – in that language design competition. Red was an interesting language in its own right.)