{"id":4,"date":"2003-12-01T20:00:07","date_gmt":"2003-12-02T03:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/archives\/2003\/12\/01\/4\/"},"modified":"2025-10-27T09:59:52","modified_gmt":"2025-10-27T16:59:52","slug":"john-backus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/archives\/2003\/12\/01\/4\/","title":{"rendered":"John Backus"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>John Backus initiated and led the project that designed and implemented Fortran, the first high-level programming language.<\/p>\n<p>I hadn&#8217;t talked to John for many years*, but tonight I called him up to say hello, and to see if he had a copy of the original Fortran compiler source code.  He didn&#8217;t but suggested I contact Irv Ziller, who was the first person to join John&#8217;s Fortran project.<\/p>\n<p>* In 1974 I worked for John Backus at IBM San Jose Research (before the Almaden Research Center was built) .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>John Backus initiated and led the project that designed and implemented Fortran, the first high-level programming language. I hadn&#8217;t talked to John for many years*, but tonight I called him up to say hello, and to see if he had a copy of the original Fortran compiler source code. He didn&#8217;t but suggested I contact &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/archives\/2003\/12\/01\/4\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;John Backus&#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":[3,43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fortran","category-people"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4","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=4"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":724,"href":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions\/724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}