Joining IBM in 1950 as a programmer, Backus was encouraged by the company in his efforts to simplify programming. In 1953, he set up a team of developers, and, after four years of work, the group launched Fortran. The name is derived from FORmula TRANslator.

First Higher-Level Language

Fortran was intended to provide an alternative to assembly and machine-language programming, and was the first higher-level programming language. Rather than requiring machine-like codes, as was prevalent at the time, it offered coding that resembled English shorthand and algebra. The Fortran compiler translated it into a form the computer understood.

Prior to Fortran, most computer programming was accomplished by working in machine code or other similarly laborious, complex methods. Fortran, by contrast, offered a system that was a kind of language. It also acquired a reputation for providing performance as good or better than hand-coding, and reduced the number of programming statements required for a given task by a factor of 20.

Fortran was originally designed for numeric computations and scientific or engineering problems. It has been used for problems in fluid dynamics, chemistry, physics, climate modeling, and many other areas. Successive versions have added capabilities, such as character-based data processing, array programming, and object-based programming. Scientists, engineers, and others rapidly adopted the language, and it's still used today.

Fortran a Result of 'Being Lazy'

Working with a colleague, Danish computer scientist Peter Naur, Backus also developed a system for defining the grammar of programming languages, known as Backus-Naur Form.

Backus was honored on many occasions for his accomplishments, including winning a 1975 National Medal of Science, a 1977 Turing Award, and a 1993 Charles Stark Draper Prize, the top award from the National Academy of Engineering. In 1991, he retired from Big Blue.

"Much of my work has come from being lazy," Backus once told an IBM internal magazine. "I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was ... writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs."

Born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1924 into an affluent family, Backus was drafted into the Army after six months at the University of Virginia. He scored high on Army aptitude tests, and ended up studying medicine, then radio engineering, and, finally, math. He earned a Master's degree from Columbia University in 1950.

Before graduating, he toured the IBM headquarters on Madison Avenue in New York, where a room-sized calculator was on display.

As he later recalled, a tour guide's question resulted in his mentioning that he was a graduate student in math. He found himself being escorted upstairs and, after a series of informal "brain teasers," he was hired on the spot as a programmer. At that time, there was no formal field of "computer science."