[NJARC] A vacuum-tube computer pioneer

[john ruccolo]

Hi NJARC folks,

A bit off-topic, but an interesting story.

^BC-Obit-Backus, 2nd Ld-Writethru,0710

^Computing pioneer John Backus dies at 82; led
development of
Fortran programming language
^By BRIAN BERGSTEIN=
^AP Technology Writer=
   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.''
   John Warner Backus was born in 1924 and grew up in
Wilmington,
Del. His father was a chemist who became a
stockbroker. Backus had
what he would later describe as a ``checkered
educational career''
in prep school and the University of Virginia, which
he left after
six months. After being drafted into the Army, Backus
studied
medicine but dropped it when he found radio
engineering more
compelling.
   Backus finally found his calling in math, and he
pursued a
master's degree at Columbia University in New York.
Shortly before
graduating, Backus toured the IBM offices in midtown
Manhattan and
came across the company's Selective Sequence
Electronic Calculator,
an early computer stuffed with 13,000 vacuum tubes.
Backus met one
of the machine's inventors, Rex Seeber _ who ``gave me
a little
homemade test and hired me on the spot,'' Backus
recalled in 1979.
   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.
   Even more importantly, ``it took about as long to
write one line
of Fortran as one line of assembly code,'' Horning
said. Previous
attempts at high-level language had failed on that
count, so
Fortran showed skeptics that machines could run just
as efficiently
without hand-coding.
   From there, a wide range of programming languages
and software
approaches proliferated, although Fortran also evolved
over the
years and remains in use.
   Known as a maverick who preferred jeans to IBM's
buttoned-up,
conservative style, Backus stayed with the company
until his
retirement in 1991. Among his other important
contributions was a
method for describing the particular grammar of
computer languages.
The system came to be known as Backus-Naur Form.
   AP-ES-03-20-07 2109EDT




 
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