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, where he spent his career. He lived in San Francisco in 2000 and 2001.
Prior to Fortran, computers had to be programmed in the raw strings of digits that triggered actions inside the machine. Fortran, short for Formula Translation, let programmers enter commands in a system the computer would translate. “It changed the game in a way that has only happened two or three times in the computer industry,” said Jim Horning of the Association for Computing Machinery.
“Much of my work has come from being lazy,” Backus told the IBM employee magazine in 1979. “I didn’t like writing programs, and so, … I started work on a programming system to make it easier.”