Perusing MSNBC's website this morning, I noticed a death notice for John Backus, creator of FORTRAN. Wow, FORTRAN! I haven't thought about that in a while.
When I was in school at Michigan State, we coded FORTRAN on data cards that were submitted to staffers at the Computer Science Center for batch runs at night. Data cards were lined up in cardboard boxes, hundred of data cards, each card corresponding to a line of code, from the first line of a program to the last. Imagine that! I wrote a whole damn compiler in FORTRAN on data cards.
The computer we used at that time was a Control Data CDC 6500, a large CPU that occupied an entire room, an environmentally controlled room, on the second floor of the Computer Science building, in the middle of campus. I could see the rows of CPU boxes, on a raised floor, with blinking lights and all that computing power contained within. (chuckling) Wow, have times ever changed!
(This is a bit off topic, but I also remember a long-haired woman who worked there in the computer lab. She always wore jeans that looked poured on her and a figure to handle that "poured" look. She had beautifully full breasts and the flattest belly I could ever imagine coveting. She wore a long-sleeve knit top with a flannel shirt over it, all tucked into those tight jeans and still her figure looked sleek and trim. Oh, do I remember her!)
Back to my original reason for this posting: here's an excerpt from MSNBC's article on John Backus's passing.
John Backus, whose development of the Fortran programming language in the 1950s changed how people interacted with computers and paved the way for modern software, has died. He was 82.Remembering John Backus, FORTRAN and my days of coding with it.
... Prior to Fortran, computers had to be meticulously "hand-coded" — programmed in the raw strings of digits that triggered actions inside the machine. Fortran was a "high-level" programming language because it abstracted that work — it let programmers enter commands in a more intuitive system, which the computer would translate into machine code on its own.
The breakthrough earned Backus the 1977 Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery, one of the industry's highest accolades. The citation praised Backus' "profound, influential, and lasting contributions."
Backus also won a National Medal of Science in 1975 and got the 1993 Charles Stark Draper Prize, the top honor from the National Academy of Engineering.
... Backus' early work at IBM included computing lunar positions on the balky, bulky computers that were state of the art in the 1950s. But he tired of hand-coding the hardware, and in 1954 he got his bosses to let him assemble a team that could design an easier system.
The result, Fortran, short for Formula Translation, reduced the number of programming statements necessary to operate a machine by a factor of 20.
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