March 5, 1957 — FORTRAN Is Published

On March 5, 1957, IBM officially published the FORTRAN Automatic Coding System — the first widely adopted high-level programming language. The announcement appeared in the proceedings of the Western Joint Computer Conference and described a revolutionary idea: programmers could write instructions in a language closer to mathematics instead of raw machine code.

The problem before FORTRAN

In the early 1950s, programming computers was extremely difficult. Programmers had to write instructions directly in machine code or assembly language. Even simple mathematical tasks required long sequences of low-level instructions.

This made software development slow and expensive. Scientists and engineers often spent more time writing programs than solving scientific problems.

The team behind FORTRAN

FORTRAN (short for “Formula Translation”) was developed at IBM under the leadership of John Backus. The project began in 1954 and involved a team of researchers including Harlan Herrick, Roy Nutt, Robert Nelson, Sheldon Best, Richard Goldberg, and Irving Ziller.

Their goal was ambitious: create a programming language that could express mathematical formulas directly and compile them into efficient machine code.

A revolutionary compiler

One of the biggest challenges was performance. At the time, many programmers believed that automatically generated code would always be slower than hand-written assembly.

The FORTRAN compiler proved them wrong. It used advanced optimization techniques to produce machine code that was often comparable to manually optimized programs.

This achievement helped convince engineers that high-level languages were practical for real scientific work.

Why FORTRAN matters

FORTRAN quickly became the dominant language for scientific and engineering computing. It was widely used in physics, aerospace, meteorology, and nuclear research.

Many later programming languages borrowed ideas from FORTRAN, including structured syntax, loops, variables, and mathematical expressions.

More importantly, FORTRAN changed how programmers think about software. Instead of focusing on hardware instructions, they could describe algorithms and formulas directly.

That shift — from machine-level programming to high-level languages — became one of the defining transitions in the history of computing.

Even today, decades later, FORTRAN is still used in high-performance computing and large scientific simulations.