The Green proposal was selected in May 1979 as the basis for the Ada programming language. It was submitted by Honeywell and led by French computer scientist Jean Ichbiah.
The U.S. Department of Defense invited contractors to propose a common high-level language for embedded computer systems. Four proposals received color code names: Red, Green, Blue, and Yellow. After an initial review in April 1978, Red and Green advanced to the next stage.
Green won in May 1979 and was then given the name Ada, honoring Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace. The proposal drew on LIS, an earlier language developed by Ichbiah and his colleagues, while also addressing the department’s demands for strong reliability, maintainability, concurrency, and run-time checking.
The color names were temporary project labels, not versions of the finished language. Another often-confused date is 1980: that is when the military standard was approved, whereas the proposal selection occurred in 1979.