http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Backus
John Warner Backus (December 3, 1924 – March 17, 2007)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070320..._te/obit_backus
Computing pioneer Backus dies
By BRIAN BERGSTEIN, AP Technology Writer Tue Mar 20, 4:46 PM ET
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.
Backus died Saturday in Ashland, Ore., according to IBM Corp., where he spent his career.
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" 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.
"It was just a quantum leap. It changed the game in a way that has only happened two or three times in the computer industry," said Jim Horning, a longtime programmer who co-chairs the Association for Computing Machinery's award committee.
That organization gave Backus its 1977 Turing Award, one of the industry's highest accolades. 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.
"Much of my work has come from being lazy," Backus told Think, the IBM employee magazine, in 1979. "I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 (an early computer), writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs."
...(more)
John Warner Backus (December 3, 1924 – March 17, 2007)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070320..._te/obit_backus
Computing pioneer Backus dies
By BRIAN BERGSTEIN, AP Technology Writer Tue Mar 20, 4:46 PM ET
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.
Backus died Saturday in Ashland, Ore., according to IBM Corp., where he spent his career.
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" 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.
"It was just a quantum leap. It changed the game in a way that has only happened two or three times in the computer industry," said Jim Horning, a longtime programmer who co-chairs the Association for Computing Machinery's award committee.
That organization gave Backus its 1977 Turing Award, one of the industry's highest accolades. 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.
"Much of my work has come from being lazy," Backus told Think, the IBM employee magazine, in 1979. "I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 (an early computer), writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs."
...(more)
