RIP – John Backus
We have lost another computer software pioneer with the passing of John Backus. An entire generation of engineers and most of the early computer industry is based on the work of John and his small team at IBM.
His team of about 10 misfit IBMers developed the FORTRAN language.
John W. Backus, who assembled and led the IBM 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.
It was an eclectic bunch that included a crystallographer, a cryptographer, a chess wizard, an employee on loan from United Aircraft, a researcher from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a young woman who joined the project straight out of Vassar College.
Backus, colleagues said, managed the research team with a light hand. The hours were long but informal. Snowball fights relieved lengthy days of work in winter. IBM had a system of rigid yearly performance reviews, which Backus deemed ill-suited for his programmers, so he ignored it. “We were the hackers of those days,” Richard Goldberg, a member of the Fortran team, recalled in an interview in 2000.
After Fortran, Backus developed, with Peter Naur, a Danish computer scientist, a notation for describing the structure of programming languages, much like grammar for natural languages. It became known as Backus-Naur form.
Thank you, John
Posted: March 20th, 2007 under General.
Tags: breakthrough_ideas, hall_of_fame, innovation