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John Warner Backus

John Warner Backus 1924-2007, American computer scientist, b. Philadelphia, Pa., grad. Columbia (M.A. 1950). Trained as a mathematician, he was hired (1950) by IBM Corp. as a computer programmer. From 1954 to 1957 he lead a team that developed FORTRAN [for FOR mula TRAN slation], the first successful high-level programming language ; it was designed for engineering and scientific applications. Fortran greatly eased computer programming by replacing the binary digits of machine language with ...

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