Two Incidents I remember about John Backus (1924-2007) – the inventor of FORTRAN, the first widely used programming language , and Draper Prize Recipient (1993).

 

During 1955—57, I was working full time at the Research Laboratories of Bendix Aviation Corporation. One of the task for me was to develop a programming language for numerically controlled machine tools. At that time, all programming for computer has to be coded bit by bit and memory was very expensive. I was very proud of the final program that I developed. A three day professional programming course happened to be given at Wayne State University in Detroit during 1956. So my boss sent me to take the course. Professor Harry Husky, one of the pioneer of computer and developer of the G-15 and G-20 series of computers, was giving a lecture on what was then called automatic programming (the art of not programming in machine languages). A young man also taking the course in the class stood up during the lecture and said that he has a better way to program than what Husky was talking about. Both Husky, the lecturer, and the audience sort of dismissed the remarks of this young man. But it made a deep impression on me since I just went through my own experience of coding a large program in machine language. I remember the persons name as Backus. But it was years later and I am already in a different endeavor in control theory that I realized that I was in the presence of the inventor of Fortran (Fortran was announced to the world in 1957) .

 

Backus never had a ph.d. but he was a life long member of the American Mathematics Society. When in 1987(?) , the AMS proudly announce the list of AMS members who were elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the list of course had names of famous professors and mathematicians. But John Backus was ignored. So he wrote a polite letter to AMS inquiring as to why his name was not included. Is it because he did not have a ph.d degree? This caused no end of embarrassment for the AMS. Of course by the 90s when he received the Draper prize, everyone knew who is Backus by then.