John Backus (1924-2007) was an American computer scientist who joined IBM in 1950 and proposed, in late 1953, a project to build an automatic coding system for the IBM 704 computer. The system that resulted was FORTRAN, short for “Formula Translation,” and Backus led the small team at IBM that designed the language and built its first compiler.
In his later firsthand account, “The History of FORTRAN I, II, and III,” Backus described the central goal of the project: to produce a system whose compiled programs would run nearly as fast as code written by hand in machine language, because most programmers at the time doubted that any automatic translator could compete with a skilled human coder. Meeting that goal required the team to invest heavily in optimization, and the effort took several years longer than first expected.
The first FORTRAN paper, “The FORTRAN Automatic Coding System,” which Backus co-authored and which was presented at the Western Joint Computer Conference in 1957, set out the design of the language and the structure of the compiler. The team reported that the compiled code was efficient enough to change how people thought about writing programs for scientific computing.
Backus went on to other influential work, including the notation now known as Backus-Naur Form for describing the syntax of programming languages, and a later line of research on what he called function-level programming. He received the ACM Turing Award in 1977.