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Fortran (1957)

Fortran dates back to 1954 when John Backus was searching for a technique to make programming easier. Fortran began as a digital code interpreter for the IBM 701, initially named "Speedcoding." The name Fortran came later — an acronym for FORmula TRANslation system, later trimmed to FORmula TRANslator. Backus's colleagues joked that it sounded like something spelled backward, but nobody could come up with a better idea, so the name stuck.

Pioneers of FORTRAN

Backus tapped Irving Ziller and Harlan Herrick (who ran the first successful Fortran program), along with Richard Goldberg, David Syre, Robert Nelson, Peter Sheridan, Roy Nutt, Sheldon F. Best, and Lois Habit. The team of ten eventually produced what was called the "software equivalent of the transistor."

FORTRAN vs Assembly

Assembly language was too specific to the machine it was written for. With clever design, Backus ensured there was no platform dependence in Fortran. While assembly mapped one-to-one to machine language, Fortran could encapsulate several machine instructions into a single statement and utilized loop optimizations.

At a Los Angeles conference, IBM arranged a demo where Fortran and assembly programmers coded the same programs simultaneously. The Fortran programs ran as efficiently as the assembly ones — but consumed far less time to write. When released in 1957, Fortran revolutionized computing.

"95 percent of the people who programmed in the early years would never have done it without Fortran. It was a massive step." — Kenneth Thompson, creator of Unix

"In the beginning, there was Fortran." — James Gray, Microsoft Research