Fortran Developer Dead at 82

John Backus, who developed the Fortran programming language, which many government systems were built on, died Saturday at age 82. Backus developed the language in the 1950s when working for IBM and computing missile trajectories, "paving the way for modern softare," the Seattle Times reports. Backus said he wanted an easier way to program computers, which at the time required the laborious task of hand coding.

Photo of Backus: View image