Fortan - compiler in 1957 - Backus at IBM and co-workers

Algol60 - an international committee of computer scientists

Cobol - around 1960 - Grace Hopper and others within the CODASYL committee sponsored by the USA Department of Defence

PL/1 - mid 60ies - people at IBM (language combining facilities of Fortran and Cobol) - very "heavy" language

Simula 67 - Dahl and Nygaad from the Norvegian Computer Center in Oslo (it adds to Algol: classes, object instances, inheritance, garbage collection (like in Java), co-routines for concurrency; and is intended for discrete event simulations)

Pascal - 1970 - Professor Klaus Wirth, ETH Zurich, Switzerland ("a small and efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring", initially intended for teaching)

C - created 1972 - people at AT&T (US telephony company) - became popular through the Unix operating system (which is written in C)

ADA - around 1980 - competition for the development of a language for embedded systems sponsored by the USA Department of Defence. The winner among 4 finalists was a French team.

Java - 1995 - people at SUN

C# - people at Microsoft (created as a competition to Java, which is not controlled by Microsoft)