Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
era in which turnover rates for programmers
averaged
20 percent annu-
ally, this was a compelling argument for employers, since their substan-
tial initial expenditures on training “pays a greater dividend” when
invested in female employees. Note that this was something of a back-
handed compliment, aimed more at the needs of employers than female
programmers. In fact, the “most undesirable category of programmers,”
Rockmael contended, was “the female about 21 years old and unmar-
ried,” because “when she would start thinking about her social commit-
ments for the weekend, her work suffered proportionately.”
14
Whatever the motivation behind the development and adoption of
any particular automatic programming system, by the mid-1950s,
a number of these systems were being proposed by various manufac-
turers. Two of the most popular and signifi cant were FORTRAN and
COBOL, each developed by different groups and intended for different
purposes.
FORTRAN
Although Hopper's A-2 compiler was arguably the fi rst modern auto-
matic programming system, the fi rst widely used and disseminated pro-
gramming language was FORTRAN, developed in 1954-1957 by a team
of researchers at the IBM Corporation. As early as 1953, the mathemati-
cian and programmer John Backus had proposed to his IBM employers
the development of a new, scientifi cally oriented programming language.
This new system for mathematical FORmula TRANslation would be
designed specifi cally for use with the soon-to-be-released IBM 704 sci-
entifi c computer. It would “enable the IBM 704 to accept a concise for-
mulation of a problem in terms of a mathematical notation and [would]
produce automatically a high-speed 704 program for the solution of the
problem.”
15
The result would be faster, more reliable, and less expensive
software development. FORTRAN would not only “virtually eliminate
programming and debugging” but also reduce operation time, double
machine output, and provide a means of feasibly investigating complex
mathematical models. In January 1954 Backus was given the go-ahead
by his IBM superiors, and a completed FORTRAN compiler was released
to all 704 installations in April 1957.
From the beginning, development of the FORTRAN language was
focused around a single overarching design objective: the creation of
effi cient machine code. Project leader Backus was highly critical of exist-
