History of Decompilation 1

History of Decompilation (1960-1979) Decompilers have been written for a variety of applications since the development of the first compilers. The very first decompiler was written by Joel Donnelly in 1960 at the Naval Electronic Labs to decompile machine code to Neliac on a Remington Rand Univac M-460 Countess computer. The project was supervised by Professor Maurice Halstead, who worked on decompilation during the 1960s and 70s, and published techniques which form the basis for today's decompilers. It is for this reason that we dedicate this page to the memory of Prof Maurice Halstead and award him the title of Father of Decompilation.