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.
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.
Modern versions of the FORTRAN language are still widely used for some scientific computing tasks – for the numerical analysis work involved in weather prediction, modeling changes in the climate, and in high-energy physics, for example. Yet today, FORTRAN is often mentioned by experi-enced computer scientists and veteran programmers wistfully, as the first programming language they learned but then abandoned as newer languages developed for new kinds of computing. FORTRAN was something you grew out of. But to point out how quickly programming has moved to generations of new tools in no way lessens the extraordinary advance that FORTRAN gave to the world of software. Other programming languages rose from the foundation that FORTRAN built. J. A. N. Lee, a professor at Virginia Tech and the dean of computer historians, has called FORTRAN “the turning point” in the development of programming languages and its compiler technology – the software equivalent of the transistor. Ken Thompson, who created the Unix operating system at Bell Labs in 1969, observed that “ninety-five percent of the people who programmed in the early years would never have done it without FORTRAN. It was a massive step.” Or, as Jim Gray, a leading software researcher who now works for Microsoft, declared with a certain biblical flourish, “In the beginning, there was FORTRAN.”
