Back in the Ice Age of the electronic digital computer -- the 1950s -- there were just a handful of computers. It took a few years to build a computer then, but what made them even more forbidding was the labyrinth that had to be entered to create the machine code that made them do anything of use.
The netherworld of the programmer would begin to change in 1953 when Backus, then a recent mathematics graduate of Columbia University, petitioned his boss at IBM for permission to try to develop an easier way to program IBM's new 701 machine. Backus assembled a team of IBMers with problem-solving abilities and they went to work under Backus' sure but light direction.
The result was their 1954 paper, "Preliminary Report, Specifications for the IBM Mathematical FORmula TRANslating System, FORTRAN." A version of the breakthrough software was included "free" with every 701 that IBM sold and Fortran was off and running. It's a tribute to Backus and his team that Fortran, the oldest high-level programming language, is still in use today.
Backus didn't seem preordained for success. A restless teenager, he was a poor student at the University of Virginia where he lasted for just a few months before he joined the Army during the war. Backus found his footing later at Columbia University, where he studied mathematics.
But it was a serendipitous walk that was his momentous turning point: While walking past IBM's headquarters building in New York City in 1950, he was fascinated with IBM's Selective Sequence Electronic Computer, then flashing its thousands of vacuum tubes in the window. He walked in and was hired after a brief conversation.
For creating the first enduring high-level software language, Backus had every right to proclaim himself a genius. Yet he was modest and often self-effacing.
"Much of my work has come from being lazy," he once said in an interview in an IBM employee publication. "I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701, writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs."
Of course, it was more difficult than that. Fortran was capable of carrying out 23,500 assembly language instructions. It was the only early computer language that could do sophisticated computations. The language reduced programming statements needed to run a computer by a factor of 20, in the opinion of software historians.
Backus remained at IBM until his retirement in 1991. He collected major computing awards for his work, including a National Medal of Science, a Charles Stark Draper Prize from the National Academy of Engineering, and a Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery.
According to family members as reported in the media, Backus died of old age in his home in Ashland, Ore.
