IBM May I?
In late 1953, John Backus sent a brief letter to Hurd, asking that he be allowed to search for a better way of programming. Hurd gave the nod and thus began a research project that would eventually produce, in 1957, a historic breakthrough in computer programming, a language called FORTRAN. The managerial touch was light and the working environment informal. Backus never made a formal budget, even as the project grew and the timetable for completion slipped again and again. The team that created FORTRAN would build gradually, one by one, until it reached 10 people. It was a young group, all still in their twenties or early thirties when FORTRAN was released. The team was heavy with math training because so much of computing at the time was numerical analysis and mathematics, sorting through all those numbers.The FORTRAN Programmers
Still, it was an eclectic bunch, a crystallographer, a cryptographer, a chess wizard, an employee loaned from United Aircraft, a researcher from MIT, a young woman who joined the project straight out of Vassar. They worked together in one open room, their desks side by side. They often worked at nights because it was the only time they could get valuable time on the machine to test and debug their code. The odd hours and close work bred camaraderie. For relaxation, there were lunch-time chess matches and, in the winter, impromptu snow ball fights. They knew each other, and they knew their code intimately and the machine they were working on, right down to the metal. And they were outsiders to the industry establishment, which regarded their chances of success as slim to nil. We were the hackers of those days, Richard Goldberg recalled at the age of 76.The success of the FORTRAN team was twofold. First, they devised a programming language that resembled a combination of English shorthand and algebra. It was a computing vernacular that was very similar to algebraic formulas that scientists and engineers used daily in their work. So FORTRAN opened up programming to the people whose problems were being put on computers in those days. With some training, they were no longer dependent on the computing priesthood to translate their problems into the language of the machine. FORTRAN moved communication with the computer up a level, closer to the human and away from the machine. That is why FORTRAN is called the first higher-level language.
The Power of a New Language
But the greater achievement of FORTRAN was that it worked so well. That is, FORTRAN generated programs that ran as efficiently, or very nearly as efficiently, as ones hand-coded so painstakingly by the programming elite. Without that leap in programming automation, FORTRAN would have never been adopted. Machine time was a precious, costly resource. If programs written in FORTRAN had run slowly, consuming far more machine time than hand-coded programs, it would have been economically impractical. Matching the run-time efficiency of human programmers was thought to be impossible at the time. Yet the IBM team succeeded because of their masterful design of the FORTRAN compiler. Put simply, a compiler is a program that captures the human intent of a program and recasts it in a way that is understandable executable, that is by the machine.
