In the last 100 years, countless IBMers have contributed to the innovations and milestones that comprise our century of progress. Below are some reflections from the great minds involved in this Icon of Progress.
Working on Fortran
“You need the willingness to fail all the time. You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very hard only to discover that they don’t work. And you keep doing that over and over until you find one that does work.”
John Backus
Fortran pioneer, IBM Fellow
“Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn’t like writing programs.… I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs.”
John Backus
Fortran pioneer, IBM Fellow
“John Backus: Long a Pathfinder in Programming, Still Crackling with Ideas,” Think magazine
July/August, 1979“We were the hackers of those days.”
Richard Goldberg
One of the original members of the Fortran development team
“When Few Knew the Code, They Changed the Language,” New York Times
June 13, 2001The intellectual satisfaction of having formulated and solved some difficult problems of translation and the knowledge and experience acquired in the process are themselves almost a sufficient reward for the long effort expended on the Fortran project.
Backus et al.
Fortran Development Team
“The Fortran Automatic Coding System,” Proceedings of the Western Joint Computer Conference
February, 1957“They told me it was a job programming computers. I only had a vague idea what that was. But I figured it must be something interesting and challenging, if they were going to pay me all that money [US$5100 in the early 1950s].”
Lois Haibt
Fortran programmer
“When Few Knew the Code, They Changed the Language,” New York Times
June 13, 2001“From late spring of 1956 to early 1957 the pace of debugging was intense; often we would rent rooms in the Langdon Hotel (which disappeared long ago) on 56th Street, sleep there a little during the day, and then stay up all night to get as much use of the computer (in the headquarters annex on 57th Street) as possible.”
John Backus
Fortran pioneer, IBM Fellow
“The History of Fortran I, II, and III,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 20, Issue 4
October, 1998Experts and observers outside of IBM ponder the impact of Fortran
“FORTRAN is a language to avoid—unless you want some answers.”
Anonymous
“The History of Fortran I, II, and III,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 20, Issue 4
October, 1998“It is impossible to overstate the impact of Fortran. It changed the scientific world, and paved the way for most of the more modern programming languages in use today. In my opinion, for real large-scale number crunching, it is, in its modern incarnations, still the best.”
Tarek Zohdi
Professor of mechanical engineering
University of California at Berkeley
“[Fortran] was just a quantum leap. It changed the game in a way that has only happened two or three times in the computer industry.”
Jim Horning
Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery
“95 percent of the people who programmed in the early years would never have done it without Fortran. It was a massive step.”
Kenneth Thompson
Creator of UNIX
“When Few Knew the Code, They Changed the Language,” New York Times
June 13, 2001“John Backus and his Fortran project members almost single-handedly invented the ideas of both programming languages and (optimizing) compilers as we know them today—they deserve all the credit they can get.”
Paul McJones
Computer programming pioneer
“Oct. 15, 1956: Fortran Forever Changes Computing’s Fortunes,” Wired
October 15, 2009“Fortran is really the de facto language for scientific computing. It had to happen for computers to propagate.”
Dag Spicer
Senior curator at the Computer History Museum
Los Angeles Times
March 21, 2007“Over half of the century of its existence, the evolving FORTRAN has been the traditional and major language for scientific programming and it has played a significant role in the research on programming languages and compilers for scientific computing.”
Boleslaw Szymanski
Editor-in-chief, Scientific Programming
“Fortran Programming Language and Scientific Programming: 50 years of mutual growth,” Scientific Programming, Volume 15
Number 1, 2007