The compiler and language were initially developed by Stephen Bourne and Michael Guy as a dialect of ALGOL 68.
ALGOL 68-R was the first implementation of the Algorithmic language ALGOL 68.
ALGOL 68RS is the second ALGOL 68 compiler written by I.F. Currie and J.D. Morrison at the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment.
ALGOL 68's elem operator is effectively "MSB 1 bit numbering" as the bits are numbered from left to right with the first bit (bits elem 1) being the "most significant bit" and the expression (bits elem bits width) giving the "least significant bit".
In the 1960s Philip Woodward's computer software team in Malvern provided the Royal Radar Establishment with the ALGOL 68R compiler, the world's first implementation of the programming language ALGOL 68, and provided the armed services with their first standard high-level programming language, Coral 66, for the small military computers of the day.
He was responsible for the research implementation of Algol 68 for the experimental MU5 computer at Manchester University, and still maintains an implementation of a subset called Algol 68S.
RTL/2, a real-time programming language based on Algol 68