Some consider him the father of moden programming. He developed ForTran at IBM in the 1950’s.
Shortly before graduating, Backus toured the IBM offices in midtown Manhattan and came across the company’s [Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator](javascript:siteSearch(‘Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator’);), an early computer stuffed with 13,000 vacuum tubes.
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.
