I.B.M.
Posted on 03/20/2007 7:10:36 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
John W. Backus, who assembled and led the I.B.M. team that created Fortran, the first widely used programming language, which helped open the door to modern computing, died on Saturday at his home in Ashland, Ore. He was 82.
John W. Backus in the late 1990s. Fortran was released in 1957.
His daughter Karen Backus announced the death, saying the family did not know the cause, other than age.
Fortran, released in 1957, was “the turning point” in computer software, much as the microprocessor was a giant step forward in hardware, according to J.A.N. Lee, a leading computer historian.
Fortran changed the terms of communication between humans and computers, moving up a level to a language that was more comprehensible by humans. So Fortran, in computing vernacular, is considered the first successful higher-level language.
Mr. Backus and his youthful team, then all in their 20s and 30s, devised a programming language that resembled a combination of English shorthand and algebra. Fortran, short for Formula Translator, was very similar to the algebraic formulas that scientists and engineers used in their daily work. With some training, they were no longer dependent on a programming priesthood to translate their science and engineering problems into a language a computer would understand.
In an interview several years ago, Ken Thompson, who developed the Unix operating system at Bell Labs in 1969, observed that “95 percent of the people who programmed in the early years would never have done it without Fortran.”
He added: “It was a massive step.”
Fortran was also extremely efficient, running as fast as programs painstakingly hand-coded by the programming elite, who worked in arcane machine languages.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I hated managing those stacks of keypunched cards...
I learned FORTRAN-2 for the IBM 7090. I don't believe that "DO loops" were invented until FORTRAN-4.
As for punch cards, my first daughter's birth announcement, circa 1983, went out on them. My client had an old 129 lying around. I typed up the vital stats and then hit the DUP key a couple dozen times.
That was the scariest language I ever had to learn! For matrix math it had elegance -- but special symbols and special keyboards, yuck! Whoever came up with that should have been shot. You are right about trying to read it -- I couldn't read my own code later! Gimme good old assembly to maintain instead of APL!
I first learned FORTRAN-4, with DO loops...
Then you might have liked IBM 360 assembly language. I learned COBOL first, then assembly afterward. That's when I really understood what COBOL was doing. I told my instructor that I should have learned assembly first, to appreciate COBOL better. He said, "We didn't want to scare you"!
My first programming experience was Fortran 77 on punch cards in high school, circa 1980. RIP Mr. Backus.
I feel old! :-)
real men used ALGOL on a B-7700.
Don't feel bad. I brought in my old Post Versalog slide rule and none of my subordinates knew what it was!
I remember buying an APL interpreter from some guy in Weed, CA. Might still have it somewhere but don't have a 5-1/4 floppy drive to load it on.
I feel fortunate my flirtations with assembly and machine code (PDP-11) were brief.
Between Soap and Fortran there was Autocoder. IBM 1400 series as I recollect.
You created cliches and created your own language to unleash them in proper order.
For those who are too young to know... Old computers cannot be found today because they contained many precious metals in their works and were worth huge bucks as scrap, especially in the Carter Administration when Gold hit about $800.00 per oz.
Old innards were also a thing of beauty too, having been meticulously produced almost entirely by hand, homologous to a fine old watch.
Not me -- it's a great language, and I think it's still the fastest one out there for heavy number crunching. It lacks some of the nicer aspects of object-oriented code, but speed .... in my line of work that's a big deal.
IF Dead
GOTO Heaven
END
Actually, seeing this thread and your comment about still writing on old cards provoked me to do a quick Google search. I found at least one company that still sells blank cards.
The Cardamation company advertises here blank cards at 2000 for $32. (They have a minimum order of $50 and I don't even want to think what the shipping would cost. :-)
Well, at least it's nice to know they're still available ...
Somewhere I have a circular slide Rule....
Yes...nice touch... thank you!
I took a course in that as well. Got an A but I've never programmed in any language so I've forgotten it all. The teacher was an outre character who was the best comp. teacher I had. He left the school (Pace University) after one term for not being able to reach a contract agreement.
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