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Fortran Pioneer John W. Backus Dies at 82


By David Worthington
April 15, 2007 — 
John W. Backus, who assembled the team that developed the Fortran programming language, passed away at his home in Ashland, Ore., on March 17. Backus was widely hailed for his contributions to modern computer programming during the 1950s and throughout his lifetime. He was 82.

Communicating human needs to computers during the formative years of programming was an intricate process that required broad knowledge of machine language. Fortran, the world’s first high-level compiler programming language, changed that. It added a level of abstraction above binary code that broke down the wall for generations of programmers.

Backus is also recognized for developing the Backus-Naur Form notation to define formal syntax, and spent much of his life researching functional-level programming.

Despite his many accomplishments, Backus is quoted in the July-August 1979 edition of Think, the IBM employee magazine, as modestly saying: “Much of my work has come from being lazy…I didn’t like writing programs.”

His death was announced by daughter Karen Backus and attributed to old age.

A STORIED LIFE
According to the Think article, Backus was born in Philadelphia in 1924 and attended a local preparatory school, where he was a self-admitted rule-breaker. He later enrolled in the University of Virginia, but left after six months, and soon after was drafted into the U.S. Army. His impressive aptitude test scores compelled the Army to encourage Backus to continue his education.

Consequently, Backus studied medicine, but switched his concentration to radio engineering to satisfy his intellectual curiosity. He eventually settled into mathematics and earned a master’s degree from Columbia University in New York. This set the path for his career at IBM.

A casual visit to IBM’s Manhattan office secured Backus’ place in history. In 1950, he went to view an early calculator—composed of more than 13,000 vacuum tubes. He was whisked upstairs after telling the tour guide that he was a qualified mathematician. IBM engineer Rex Seeber, inventor of the machine, hired Backus on the spot after giving him an impromptu test, Backus recalled in his interview with Think.

Backus and his team of proto-hackers began working on Fortran in 1954, and within three years had written the first manual and compiler. The language was a fundamental part of university computer science programs through the 1970s and 1980s.

Backus remained an IBM employee until his retirement in 1991. During his tenure at IBM, he received the ACM Turing Award in 1977, the National Medal of Science in 1975, the 1993 Charles Stark Draper Prize and was named an IBM fellow in 1963.


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