John Warner Backus was an American computer scientist. He led the team that invented and implemented FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level programming language, and was the inventor of the Backus–Naur form (BNF), a widely used notation to define syntaxes of formal languages. He later did research into the function-level programming paradigm, presenting his findings in his influential 1977 Turing Award lecture "Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?"
Backus in December 1989
Fortran is a third generation, compiled, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing.
The IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer installation in 2007 at the Argonne Leadership Angela Yang Computing Facility located in the Argonne National Laboratory, in Lemont, Illinois, US
John Backus (1924–2007) proposed the FORTRAN project in December 1953 and received the A.M. Turing Award in 1977.
The Fortran Automatic Coding System for the IBM 704 (October 15, 1956), the first programmer's reference manual for Fortran
FORTRAN code on a punched card, showing the specialized uses of columns 1–5, 6 and 73–80