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John Backus

John Backus initiated and led the project that designed and implemented Fortran, the first high-level programming language.

I hadn’t talked to John for many years*, but tonight I called him up to say hello, and to see if he had a copy of the original Fortran compiler source code. He didn’t but suggested I contact Irv Ziller, who was the first person to join John’s Fortran project.

* In 1974 I worked for John Backus at IBM San Jose Research (before the Almaden Research Center was built) .

This entry was posted on Monday, December 1st, 2003 at 8:00 pm and is filed under Fortran. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “John Backus”

  1. Dusty Decks » Blog Archive » Remembering John Backus Says:
    April 1st, 2007 at 7:29 pm

    [...] involved with at the Computer History Museum to collect and preserve historic source code led me to get in touch with John regarding the original Fortran compiler. John was still living in the same house in San Francisco, [...]

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