science · 20 September 1954 · 70 years ago
In 1954, the first successful test compilation and execution of a computer program using what became FORTRAN was run by Harlan Herrick at IBM. It took until 1957 to develop into a fully-operational, commercial product. As implied by its name (FORMula TRANslator), Fortran was designed as a high-level language for technical and scientific applications which primarily needed calculation, rather than working with characters. John Backus at IBM supervised the development of the programming language that would allow users to express their problems in commonly understood mathematical formulae. By 1958 the language was expanded to Fortran II, which included subroutines, functions and common blocks, and in 1962 IBM introduced the extended Fortran IV.
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