Programming pioneers bag $1m prize Share Copy This year’s Turing Award has gone to two men who helped create the foundation on which modern software is built. Jeffrey Ullman and Alfred Aho first met when doing their PhDs at Princeton University in the early 1960s; a time when computing machines were devices operated and programmed by a relatively small group of mathematicians and specialists. But thanks to their pioneering work that began at Bell Labs in 1967 and went on for several decades, they managed to open up computers to a vast array of people who began to write software that now powers just about everything we equate with the modern world.