Daniel N. Leeson’s article “IBM FORTRAN Exhibit and Film” in the FORTRAN’S Twenty-Fifth Anniversary special issue of the Annals of the History of Computing mentions that materials were located in private collections, “two of which are unusually noteworthy”:
Roy Nutt and Harlan Herrick have both made a special effort to retain material from their early days [...]
My wife and I had dinner with John Backus tonight. He mentioned that he donated his papers to the Library of Congress. I searched the online catalog, and found the papers listed as not yet processed (LC Control Number: mm2003084968). John gave me a 13-page document listing some 211 items in the [...]
Today I got my hands on a copy of “FORTRAN’s Twenty-Fifth Anniversary” — a special issue of the Annals of the History of Computing, Volume 6, Number 1 (January 1984). This was originally published by the American Federation of Information Processing Societies (AFIPS), but is now published by the IEEE Computer Society.
This informative issue, [...]
At the suggestion of Tom Van Vleck, I sent Doug McIlroy an email asking if he’d run across the Fortran “Tome” while at Bell Labs in the 1950s. He replied:
I was at MIT when the first Fortran came out, and I don’t recall seeing the source there. When I joined Bell Labs in [...]
Dick Gabriel, another member of the Software Collection Committee at the Computer History Museum, mentioned Paul Pierce’s impressive computer collection, which includes an IBM 709 and an IBM 7094. I decided to send Paul an email asking if he’d run across the IBM 704 source code or the “Tome”. He replied:
I did not [...]
Bob Bemer joined IBM in 1949 and has an interesting web site documenting his long career, including leading the development of FORTRANSIT, the second Fortran compiler, for the IBM 650.
Using Google, I came across Bob Bemer’s Who Was Who in IBM’s Programming Research? — Early FORTRAN Days which reproduced an IBM Programming Research [...]
Tonight after rereading John Backus’s 1981 “History of Fortran I, II, and III” paper and recalling the discussion between Dick Sites and Len Shustek regarding the Fortran documentation Dick had seen in the 1960s, I decided to start asking people specifically about the “Tome” as well as, more generally, “the source code” (which might [...]
At the monthly Software Collection Committee meeting, it was agreed to include “early Fortran” as one of the first tests for our collection and preservation efforts. I volunteered to lead this activity, and Lee Courtney and Len Shustek also signed up. Lee suggested that since the museum already has a restored IBM 1620 [...]
In a response to Software Collection Committee chairman Bernard L. Peuto’s request for suggestions for “10 software preservation candidates for testing our processes”, Dick Sites mentioned:
I once saw and read part of the original handwritten Fortran I documentation in a basement of the Sloan building at MIT in 1965. Backus might know if [...]
I was chatting with Jim King at lunch about John Backus and the Fortran compiler (Jim worked at IBM Research for many years). Jim used Fortran (II?) and Fortran Monitor System on an IBM 709 in college in the early 1960s, and had some interesting anecdotes (e.g., the compiler turned on a front panel [...]
Irv Ziller, who was the first person to join John Backus on the Fortran team, responded to my inquiry regarding the source code for the original Fortran compiler by saying, “I do not have the source code, however I recall material being sent to the Smithsonian to become part of their collection.”
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 [...]