On October 15, 1956, IBM published the first FORTRAN reference manual — officially titled The FORTRAN Automatic Coding System for the IBM 704 EDPM: Programmer’s Reference Manual — handing programmers the rulebook for what would become the first widely used high-level programming language.
FORTRAN (short for “Formula Translation”) was the brainchild of a team at IBM led by John Backus, built to let scientists and engineers write math-heavy programs using something closer to algebraic notation instead of hand-coded machine instructions. The manual landed months before the actual compiler shipped in April 1957, but it mattered enormously: for the first time, a computer could translate human-readable formulas into working code, cutting development time dramatically and making the IBM 704 far more approachable for technical users. Decades later, FORTRAN is still in active use in scientific computing, weather modeling, and numerical simulation — a remarkably long run for a 1950s-era language.
Also on this day: October 15, 2018 marked the death of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen at age 65. Alongside Bill Gates, Allen helped launch Microsoft in 1975 and later became a major investor in technology, sports, and science, including funding the Allen Institute for Brain Science and backing early private spaceflight ventures.
Source: Computer History Museum — This Day in History, October
Daily Tech History is a running series looking back at notable moments in technology on this date.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.