John Backus Passes at 82
John Backus, father of the Fortran computer language, passed away earlier this week at age 82. Though he earns a solid place in the beTech Hall of Fame as much for his hacker spirit as well as for pioneering one of the earliest (and most enduring) programming languages, he probably won’t catch a headline in UVa news because, well, John didn’t fare so well here:
After flunking out of the University of Virginia, Mr. Backus was drafted in 1943. But his scores on Army aptitude tests were so high that he was dispatched on government-financed programs to three universities, with his studies ranging from engineering to medicine.
He would later get his masters in math at Columbia University and join IBM as a programmer. Computer programming in the 1950’s still required “hand-to-hand combat with the machine”—banging out assembly code. Backus envisioned a better way and, with his superior’s approval, assembled a young, diverse team to create a FORmula TRANslation System, Fortran.
Still in use today, Fortran changed the landscape of computing and earned Backus a National Medal of Science, a Charles Stark Draper Prize from the National Academy of Engineering, and a Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery.
