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John Backus, Fortran originator, dead at 82
John Backus, leader of the original IBM Fortran development team, has died at 82. Fortran is widely held as the first successful high-level computing language. As such, it began the evolution of mainstream software programming away from the realm of machine and assembly coders, allowing a more ‘human-readable’ approach to programming.
After serving in the US Army, Backus received his BS in mathematics from Columbia's School of General Studies in 1949. He was an IBM programmer in New York City from 1950 to 1954; and became manager of IBM programming research in 1954. One of his first jobs at IBM allowed him to work with famed computer scientist Wallace J. Eckert - then director of IBM’s Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory - to compute lunar orbits.
When Backus began to pursue the Fortran project in the mid-1950s at IBM, debugging of programs was already known as an exceptionally time consuming task. He had previously worked on an interpretive system which formulated and executed machine instructions for floating-point math and other operations on the IBM 701 and the later 704.
In creating FORTAN, Backus decided it would be useful to employ a compiler program written in a computing language that was understandable by a broader group of individuals than languages used by the first generation of computer programmers, whose work was very closely connected to requirements of mainframe hardware.
The compiler idea had been advanced previously by Grace Hopper. The compiler as carefully created by Backus and his colleagues eventually proved to be competitive with the fast assembler programs of the day.
In 1957, IBM released Fortran, which stood for Formula Translator. This algebraic language proved especially adept in mathematic problem solving, and continues to be heavily used in scientific and other numerical analysis applications today. Languages such as Basic built on and simplified aspects of Fortran. Some viewers have credited Backus with the first advances in problem-solving functional programming, still an area of promising activity.
As described by Backus, speaking for a history of IBM, the Fortran designers had created a language they allowed the 704 “to accept a concise formulation of a problem in terms of mathematical notation and to produce automatically a high-speed 704 program” for its solution.
Backus was an IBM Fellow from 1963 into the 1990s. He received the National Medal of Science in 1975 and the ACM Turing Award in 1977. In 1993, he received the Charles Stark Draper Prize from the National Academy of Engineering.
Like many other engineering efforts, the drive to create Fortran was at least in part the drive of an individual to eliminate some form of tedious work. In the biography of Backus on the IBM web site he says: “Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn’t like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701, writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs.”
Related;
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/builders/builders_backus2.html
[Some material cited in this article is sourced from “IBM’s Early Computers,” by Bashe et al, MIT Press, 1986.]
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