On October 15, 1956, IBM released the first reference manual for the Fortran language

On October 15, 1956, IBM released «The FORTRAN Automatic Coding System for the IBM 704», the first programmer's reference manual for the Fortran language. The language for numerical and scientific computation was created by John Backus's team, and in December 1953 he proposed to IBM a more practical replacement for assembly language for the IBM 704.

The proposal was accepted, and by November 1954 the draft specification «The IBM Mathematical Formula Translating System» was ready. The language's name stood for Formula Translating System, and the first release for the IBM 704 contained 32 statement types. Besides Backus, ten programmers worked on the language, among them Lois Haibt, Roy Nutt and David Sayre.

Work on the compiler

The compiler appeared later: the first was delivered in April 1957, and compilers began producing accurate code only two years after that. In a 1979 interview with IBM Think magazine, Backus explained this by laziness: he disliked writing programs by hand and was looking for a way to make his work easier.

The wager on translating formulas into machine code turned out to be a long one. At first version names were written in capitals: early IBM computers did not support lowercase letters, and up to FORTRAN 77 the name was usually typeset as FORTRAN. The spelling Fortran was fixed by the 1990 standard.

Distribution and the standard

By 1963 more than 40 Fortran compilers existed, and over 220 thousand language manuals had been distributed. In 1966 ANSI published an industry standard for the language.

Fortran is still alive: it is used in high-performance computing, including the tasks by which supercomputer performance is assessed. The Fortran 2023 standard was published in November 2023.

Image: PIerre.Lescanne CC BY-SA 4.0 · License

Translation editors: Соловьев В., Пеков А.