FORTRAN, short for “Formula Translation,” was an automatic coding system for the IBM 704 computer, developed by a team at IBM led by John Backus. The Programmer’s Reference Manual, dated October 1956, describes FORTRAN as a system that lets a programmer write a program in a language close to ordinary mathematical notation, which the system then translates into an efficient machine-language program for the 704.
The language let programmers write formulas, loops (the DO statement), conditional branches, and input and output in a form much closer to mathematics and plain notation than the machine instructions that earlier programs were written in. This made scientific and engineering programs far quicker to write and easier to read than hand-coded machine language.
The 1957 paper “The FORTRAN Automatic Coding System” reported that the compiler did substantial work to make the translated programs run efficiently, so that the convenience of a higher-level language did not come at a large cost in speed. This combination of readability and speed is the main reason FORTRAN is generally regarded as the first widely used high-level programming language.
FORTRAN was released for the IBM 704 in 1957 and was quickly adopted for scientific and engineering work. Its success demonstrated that high-level languages were practical, and it influenced the design of many later languages. Descendants of FORTRAN remain in use for numerical computing today.