 In October 1963 a committee was formed composed originally of three IBMers from New York and three members of SHARE, the IBM
scientific users group, to propose these extensions to Fortran.Given the constraints of Fortran, they were unable to do this and embarked on the design of a "new programming language" based loosely on ALGOL labeled "NPL".This acronym conflicted with that of the UK's National Physical Laboratory and was replaced briefly by MPPL (MultiPurpose Programming Language) and, in 1965, with PL/I (with a Roman numeral "I").