The history of FORTRAN I, II, and III

ABSTRACT

Before 1954 almost all programming was done in machine language or assembly language. Programmers rightly regarded their work as a complex, creative art that required human inventiveness to produce an efficient program. Much of their effort was devoted to overcoming the difficulties created by the computers of that era: the lack of index registers, the lack of built- in floating point operations, restricted instruction sets (which might have AND but not OR, for example), and primitive input- output arrangements. Given the nature of computers, the services which “automatic programming” performed for the programmer were concerned with overcoming the machine's shortcomings. Thus the primary concern of some “automatic programming” systems was to allow the use of symbolic addresses and decimal numbers (e.g., the MIDAC Input Translation Program [Brown and Carr 1954]). But most of the larger “automatic. Programming” systems (with the exception of Laning and Zierler's algebraic system [Laning and Zierler 1954] and the A-2 compiler [Remington Rand 1953; Moser 1954]) simply provided a synthetic “computer” with an order code different from that of the real machine. This synthetic computer usually had floating point instructions and index registers and had improved input-output commands; it was therefore much easier to program than its real counterpart.

REFERENCES

• 1: Adams, Charles W. and Laning, J. H., Jr. 1954 May. The MIT systems of automatic coding: Comprehensive, Summer Session, and Algebraic. In Proc. Symp. on Automatic Programming for Digital Computers. Washington DC: The Office of Naval Research.
• 2: Addenda to the FORTRAN Programmer's Reference Manual. 1957 February 8. (Transmitted to Dr. John Greenstadt, Special Programs Group, Applied Science Division, IBM, for distribution to SHARE members, by letter from John W. Backus, Programming Research Dept. IBM. 5 pages.)
• 3: Additions to FORTRAN II 1958. Description of Source Language Additions to the FORTRAN II System. New York: Programming Research, IBM Corp. (Distributed to users of FORTRAN III. 12 pages.)
• 4: Ash, R.; Broadwin, E.; Della Valle, V.; Katz, C.; Greene, M.; Jenny, A.; and Yu, L. 1957. Preliminary Manual for MATHMATIC and ARITHMATIC Systems (for Algebraic Translation and Compilation for UNIVAC I and II). Philadelphia Pa: Remington Rand UNIVAC.
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• 6: Backus, John 1954 May 21. Letter to J. H. Laning, Jr.
• 7: Backus, J. W. 1958 November. Automatic programming: properties and performance of FORTRAN systems I and II. In Proc. Symp. on the Mechanisation of Thought Processes. Teddington, Middlesex, England: The National Physical Laboratory.
• 8: Backus, John 1976 June 10-15. Programming in America in the nineteen fifties—some personal impressions. In Proc. International Conf. on the History of Computing, Los Alamos. (Publisher yet to be selected.)
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• 11: Backus, John W. and Herrick, Harlan 1954 May. IBM 701 Speedcoding and other automatic programming systems. In Proc. Symp. on Automatic Programming for Digital Computers. Washington DC: The Office of Naval Research.
• 12: Backus, J. W.; Beeber, R. J.; Best, S.; Goldberg, R.; Haibt, L. M.; Herrick, H. L.; Nelson, R. A.; Sayre, D.; Sheridan, P. B.; Stern, H.; Ziller, I.; Hughes, R. A.; and Nutt, R. 1957 February. The FORTRAN automatic coding system. In Proc. Western Joint Computer Conf. Los Angeles.
• 13: Charles L. Baker, The PACT I Coding System for the IBM Type 701, Journal of the ACM (JACM), v.3 n.4, p.272-278, Oct. 1956 [doi>10.1145/320843.320845]
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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  K. Computing Milieux
  K.2 HISTORY OF COMPUTING

      Nouns: FORTRAN

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.1 PROGRAMMING TECHNIQUES
      D.1.2 Automatic Programming

General Terms:
Languages, Theory