IOP Groups

John Backus

born December 23, 1924 died March 17, 2007

Obituaries published in: The Times, April 3, 2007 page 54

He was a computer scientist and mathematician who led the team which developed the 'Fortran' programming language while working at IBM in the 1950s. 'Fortran' allowed programmes to be written in a logical form independent of the computer on which they were to be run. This form was similar to the formulae used by scientists; it allowed large sophisticated applications to be written quickly to exploit the new hardware. The paper outlining the concepts was published in 1954. Fortran for the IBM 704 computer was released in 1957.

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