{"id":19,"date":"2004-05-22T22:00:00","date_gmt":"2004-05-23T05:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/archives\/2004\/05\/22\/19\/"},"modified":"2014-03-15T10:58:48","modified_gmt":"2014-03-15T18:58:48","slug":"john-backuss-archived-papers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/archives\/2004\/05\/22\/19\/","title":{"rendered":"The Library of Congress"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My wife and I had dinner with John Backus tonight.  He mentioned that he donated his papers to the Library of Congress.  I searched the online catalog, and found the papers listed as not yet processed (LC Control Number: mm2003084968).  John gave me a 13-page document listing some 211 items in the donated papers.  I was pleased to see item 92: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mcjones.org\/paul\/rj1589.pdf\">&#8220;A Church-Rosser property of closed applicative languages&#8221; by Paul McJones (IBM Research Report, 5\/23\/75)<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>John also gave me some extra copies of papers and photographs, including a photocopy of a 29-page memo whose front page says:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nPRELIMINARY REPORT<\/p>\n<p>Programming Research Group<br \/>\nApplied Science Division<br \/>\nInternational Business Machines Corporation<\/p>\n<p>November 10, 1954<\/p>\n<p>Specifications for<br \/>\nThe IBM Mathematical FORmula TRANslating System,<br \/>\nFORTRAN<\/p>\n<p>Copyright, 1954, by International Business Machines Corporation<br \/>\n590 Madison Avenue, New York, 22, New York\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>J.A.N. Lee&#8217;s annotated bibliography says this was probably written by John W. Backus, Harlan Herrick, and Irving Ziller; he notes, &#8220;This is the first formal proposal for the language FORTRAN. It lists the elements of the language that are proposed to be included in the eventual implementation, together with some suggestions for future extensions. It is interesting to match this proposal with the Programmer&#8217;s Reference Manual (1957) and to note that many of the ideas of later FORTRANs as well as ALGOL appear to have been given birth in this document.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My wife and I had dinner with John Backus tonight. He mentioned that he donated his papers to the Library of Congress. I searched the online catalog, and found the papers listed as not yet processed (LC Control Number: mm2003084968). John gave me a 13-page document listing some 211 items in the donated papers. I &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/archives\/2004\/05\/22\/19\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The Library of Congress&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fortran"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":712,"href":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions\/712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}