The Howdy Glossary

MAD is a programming language designed for scientific and engineering applications. Developed in the late 1950s at IBM's Poughkeepsie Laboratory by John R. Brown, it was widely used in IBM mainframe computers through the late 1970s. The acronym stands for Michigan Algorithm Decoder due to its initial use at the University of Michigan’s digital computer lab. MAD features conditional statements and iterative loops – concepts that have become fundamental in modern programming languages. Despite its historical importance, MAD has been largely replaced by more advanced technical computing languages like Fortran and MATLAB but remains an important stepping stone in the evolution of programming languages tailored to scientific workloads on large-scale computational platforms.