The FORTRAN automatic coding system was developed at IBM through the mid-1950s and became available to users of the IBM 704 computer in 1957. The Computer History Museum holds a copy of the “FORTRAN Automatic Coding System for the IBM 704 EDPM: Preliminary Operator’s Manual,” dated April 1957, which describes how to load and run the system tape on the machine.
The release mattered because, until then, most serious programs were written directly in machine or assembly language for a specific computer. FORTRAN let programmers write in a notation close to mathematics and have the system translate it into machine code, dramatically reducing the time and specialized knowledge needed to write scientific and engineering programs.
The 1957 paper “The FORTRAN Automatic Coding System,” presented at the Western Joint Computer Conference, documented the released system and reported that its compiled programs ran efficiently enough to be practical for real work. This combination of convenience and speed is why the 1957 release is treated as a turning point in the history of programming.
Because FORTRAN ran on a widely sold IBM machine and was distributed to its customers, it reached a large audience quickly and helped establish the idea that programmers could and should work in high-level languages.