JOHN WARNER BACKUS (December 3, 1924 – March 17, 2007) he was an American computer scientist

Pers onal Life  Backus was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and grew up in nearby Wilmington, Delaware. He studied at the The Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, and was apparently not a diligent student. After entering the University of Virginia to study chemistry, he quit and was conscripted into the U.S. Army. He began medical training at Haverford College and, during an internship at a hospital, he was diagnosed with a cranial bone tumor, which was successfully removed; a plate was installed in his head, and he ended medical training after nine months and a subsequent operation to replace the plate with one of his own design

Earlier Work  John Backus, whose development of the Fortran programming language in the 1950s changed how people interacted with computers and paved the way for modern software, has died. He was 82Prior to Fortran, computers had to be meticulously "hand- coded" — programmed in the raw strings of digits that triggered actions inside the machine.  Fortran was a "high-level" programming language because it abstracted that work — it let programmers enter commands in a more intuitive system, which the computer would translate into machine code on its own.. Fortran, short for Formula Translation, reduced the number of programming statements  A wide range of programming languages and software approaches proliferated, although Fortran also evolved over the years and remains in use. Among his other important contributions was a method for describing the particular grammar of computer languages. The system is known as Backus-Naur Form.

Contributions to Computer Science  Backus visited the IBM Computer Center on Madison Avenue, where he toured the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC), one of IBM’s early electronic computers. Backus spent three years working on the SSEC, during which time he invented a program called Speedcoding. The program was the first to include a scaling factor, which allowed both large and small numbers to be easily stored and manipulated.  In late 1953, Backus wrote a memo to his boss that outlined the design of a programming language for IBM’s new computer, the 704. This computer had a built-in scaling factor, also called a floating point, and an indexer, which significantly reduced operating time.

Achievements  FORTRAN was designed for mathematicians and scientists, and remains the preeminent programming language in these areas today. It allows people to work with their computers without having to understand how the machines actually work, and without having to learn the machine’s assembly language. That FORTRAN is still in use 40 years after its introduction is testimony to Backus’s vision.  As projectleader with IBM John Backus developed in the early 1950's with his team: Fortran - Formula Translator. Fortran was released in The first high level programming language. This language is most widely used in physics and engineering.