Path of the Gadget Freak
At 76, John Backus cheerfully described himself as a gadget freak. He confesses an addiction to his Palm Pilot. Couldn't live without it, he joked. He has rigged up his own automatic remote controls for his front gate and garage door. He had just acquired a television set-top gadget that, using a large computer disk and some clever programming, allows viewers to skip commercials, pause while viewing live broadcasts and record television programs based on database searches. This is a great invention, John Backus declared with delight. It's going to change television.
John Backus Vs The School System
John Backus had a complicated, difficult relationship with his family, and was a wayward student. His parents sent him to an exclusive private high school, The Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. His grades were so poor that he was sent every summer to a study camp to allow him to advance with his class the following fall. I loved the fact that flunking courses meant I did not have to go home, John Backus said. He regarded The Hill School as a problem-solving challenge of sorts. The delight of that place was all the rules you could break, he said. His approach to formal education was unchanged in college. He lasted two semesters at the University of Virginia before he flunked out.His uninspired performance as a student had nothing to do with his intellect, as his military experience soon demonstrated. John Backus was drafted in 1943, immediately after he and the University of Virginia parted ways. Stellar scores on Army aptitude tests resulted in Backus being sent first to the University of Pittsburgh for an engineering course, and later to Haverford College for a pre-med course. Next, Backus attended New York Medical College in Manhattan on a government-funded program, though he found medicine boring. It seemed to be all memorizing procedures and body parts, he recalled.
High-Fidelity
While wondering what to do next, John Backus, a classical music enthusiast, decided that what his small Manhattan apartment needed was a good sound system. He began to construct his own high-fidelity set, and soon found himself attending courses at a school for radio technicians. To build an amplifier, Backus had to calculate points on the curve of sound waves. He found wrestling with the mathematics to be difficult but compelling. It was so awful to do that calculation, but somehow it kind of got me interested in math, he said. So Backus applied to Columbia University, which admitted him as a probationary student, given his decidedly mixed record as a scholar. He did well at Columbia, completing a bachelors' degree and earning a masters in mathematics in 1950.
Poppa
One spring day, shortly before graduating from Columbia, John Backus visited IBM's headquarters on 57th Street and Madison Avenue. He had heard about the massive scientific calculating machine on display there and, given his fascination with mechanical things, he wanted to take a look at it. IBM had installed the computer on the ground floor, so it could be seen from the street as a kind of tourist curiosity. With its thousands of flashing lights, clacking switches, punched cards shuffling and paper tapes whirring, the computer struck many passersby an electronic Rube Goldberg contraption. The passing pedestrian throngs probably did not know what to make of the machine, but they displayed an impulse, one repeated again and again over the years; for giving computers anthropomorphic nicknames. They dubbed the machine Poppa.
