John Warner Backus was an American computer scientist.
15 Facts About John Backus
2.
John Backus received the National Medal of Science in 1975 and the 1977 Turing Award" for profound, influential, and lasting contributions to the design of practical high-level programming systems, notably through his work on FORTRAN, and for publication of formal procedures for the specification of programming languages".
3.
John Backus retired in 1991 and died at his home in Ashland, Oregon on March 17,2007.
4.
John Backus studied at The Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, but he was apparently not a diligent student.
5.
John Backus entered college at the University of Virginia to study chemistry, but struggled with his classes there, and he was expelled after less than a year for poor attendance.
6.
John Backus was conscripted into the US Army during World War II, and eventually came to hold the rank of corporal, being put in command of an anti-aircraft battery stationed at Fort Stewart, Georgia.
7.
John Backus later transferred to a pre-medical program at Haverford College.
8.
John Backus then moved to the Flower and Fifth Avenue Medical School for medical school, but found it uninteresting and dropped out after nine months.
9.
John Backus soon underwent a second operation to replace the metal plate in his head with one of his own design, and received an honorable medical discharge from the US Army in 1946.
10.
John Backus graduated from Columbia University with a bachelor's degree in 1949 and a master's degree in 1950, both in mathematics, and joined IBM in 1950.
11.
In 1953 John Backus developed the language Speedcoding, the first high-level language created for an IBM computer, to aid in software development for the IBM 701 computer.
12.
Programming was very difficult at this time, and in 1954 John Backus assembled a team to define and develop Fortran for the IBM 704 computer.
13.
John Backus served on the international committees that developed ALGOL 58 and the very influential ALGOL 60, which quickly became the de facto worldwide standard for publishing algorithms.
14.
When John Backus publicized the function-level style of programming, his message was mostly misunderstood as being the same as traditional functional programming style languages.
15.
John Backus spent the latter part of his career developing FL, a successor to FP.