fortran history
John W. Backus, in late 1953, submitted a proposal. This was at IBM, to his superiors. It described a more efficient alternative to assembly language for programming. It was for the IBM 704 mainframe computer. A draft specification for The IBM Mathematical Formula Translating System was completed by mid-1954.
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While originally intended only for internal use on the IBM 704 computer, the language was eventually made available to any customer purchasing an IBM 704. The first "official" manual for FORTRAN appeared in October 1956, with the first FORTRAN compiler delivered in April 1957. This was an optimizing compiler, because customers were reluctant to use a high-level programming language unless its compiler could generate code whose performance was comparable to that of hand-coded assembly language.
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The language was widely adopted by scientists for writing numerically intensive programs, which encouraged compiler writers to produce compilers that could generate faster and more efficient code. The inclusion of a complex number data type in the language made Fortran especially suited to technical applications such as electrical engineering.
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By 1960, FORTRAN versions were available for the IBM 709, 650, 1620, and 7070 computers. Significantly, the increasing popularity of FORTRAN spurred competing computer manufacturers to provide FORTRAN compilers for their machines, so that by 1963 over 40 FORTRAN compilers existed. For these reasons, FORTRAN is considered to be the first, widely used cross-platform programming language[citation needed].
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