Excerpts:

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When I joined Regnecentralen as a full time employee, on 1959 February 1, the work on ALGOL was in full swing. Willy Heise in November 1958 had made a visit to Fritz Bauer and Klaus Samelson in Mainz and had opened the contact to the group of central European computing centres that later took part in the so-called ALCOR collaboration.

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And then we were back to meetings. First an open meeting in Paris in November 1959 with participation of 49 persons from 9 different countries. Besides thorough discussions of ALGOL itself, the meeting took care of the appointment of the European participants in the final, international ALGOL committee, which made me one of them. This part of the committee met again in December in Mainz for thorough discussions in preparation for the final meeting with the Americans in January. This confirmed to me that my best contribution would be in the area of description. Thus I spent Christmas at the formulation of our results in a final form, as far as possible. At the final meeting of the complete ALGOL committee in Paris in January 1960 this formulation became decisive, and was the reason why I was given the task to work out the official description of the language we could agree upon. This fitted well into the domestic plans: one week after my return from Paris Regnecentralen's first course of the new language started. This course was given every day for a week, fortunately in the afternoon; this enabled me to finish the necessary parts of the ALGOL 60 Report on the same day in the morning, immediately before the teaching.

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The GIER ALGOL project got its start signal on the day I returned to Copenhagen, 1962 January 5. Bech called us to a conference asking us (I don't know whether he thought we would refuse) to develop an ALGOL compiler for GIER. It had to be finished before the 1st September the same year, since it had to be ready for the beginning of the university semester. It did not matter whether it was poor or slow, or whether it included the complete language, if only it could be called by the name of ALGOL. At this last stipulation Jørn and I exchanged a glance: Bech would be shown something different. We accepted the task, on one condition: that we would be getting ample access to a machine during the testing.

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The development of the GIER ALGOL compiler made fast progress during the spring. I myself went to the USA on the 21st June 1962 to tell about the work at a summer school in North Carolina. At that time the first five translator passes were running and the run time subroutines had been written. I took the input/output specifications of pass 6 along on the trip, Jørn took over pass 7, and passes 8 and 9 and the standard functions were in the hands of others in the group. When I came back from USA on the 26th of July everything was ready for testing except the machine language formulation of pass 6. Since we were now aiming at a demonstration of the compiler at the IFIP Congress in Munich from the 27th of August we had a busy month. We were in fact active from about 6 in the morning until midnight on most days.

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The presentation of the GIER ALGOL at the exhibition in Munich was a success. The system could be demonstrated and put at the disposal of the guests, and it worked with only very few flaws that we managed to fix on the spot.