Tech Pioneer Backus Dies John Backus, the computer pioneer who developed the Fortran programming language while working for International Business Machines during the 1950s, has died at age 82. Before Mr. Backus came along, programmers were forced to enter streams of digits into computers to get them to perform tasks, but Fortran allowed programmers to enter commands in a more intuitive, less arduous way. His enormous breakthrough won him the coveted Turing Award in 1977, and he was showered with numerous citations in later years, including a National Medal of Science and a Charles Stark Draper Prize, top honor of the National Academy of Engineering. Mr. Backus always insisted that his great innovation sprang from his own innate inertia. "Much of my work has come from being lazy,'' he recalled for an IBM employee magazine in 1979. "I didn't like writing programs, and so I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs.'' Mr. Backus took some time to find his calling in the world of technology. After earning so-so grades during his school years, he wound up serving in the Army during World War II and then briefly studied medicine. He worked for IBM until his retirement in 1991.
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