Pascal was designed in the 1968-1970 time period by Niklaus Wirth to overcome many of the deficiencies of the earlier ALGOL language. It was named after the French mathematician Blaise Pascal, who developed a digital calculator in 1642. From the late 1970s through the late 1980s it was the dominant language in beginning computer science courses, but C has recently grown in popularity and seems to be replacing Pascal as the initial academic programming language.