1924-

American Computer scientist

During the 1950s, John Backus headed the pioneering group at IBM that developed FORTRAN, the first widely used computer programming language. He was also instrumental in the development of ALGOL, which, though it did not gain wide commercial usage, had a significant influence on three languages that did: Pascal, C, and Ada. Winner of the National Medal of Science, the Turing Award, and the Charles Stark Draper Prize, Backus has continued to work on programming languages even after his retirement from IBM in 1991.

Backus was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1924, and grew up in Wilmington, Delaware. When he enrolled in the University of Virginia in 1942, he planned to major in chemical engineering, but these plans were stymied when, after one semester, he was expelled for skipping classes. At the time, America was embroiled in World War II, and Backus, divested of his...