John Backus was born in Philadelphia in 1924 and grew up in Wilmington, Delaware. He attended the Hill School in Pottstown, PA, but he was not a good student and failed many of his classes. In his words:
 
            I flunked out every year. I never studied. I hated studying. I was just goofing around. It had the delightful consequence that every year, I went to summer school in New Hampshire where I spent the summer sailing and having a nice time.

    He graduated from the Hill School in 1942 and went to the University of Virginia to study chemistry at his father's request. He enjoyed the theoretical aspects of it, but disliked the lab work. His attendance fell to once per week by his second semester, and he was expelled. He then joined the Army, where he served as a corporal in charge of an anti-aircraft crew at Ft. Stewart in Georgia. He then enrolled in a pre-engineering course at the University of Pittsburgh. He also enrolled at Haverford College to study medicine after taking an aptitude test. As a part of the premed program, he worked at an Atlantic City hospital, and was diagnosed with a brain tumor. He had to get a plate installed in his head. In March 1945, he entered Flower and Fifth Avenue Medical School in New York, but realized that medicine wasn't for him either:

        I hated it. They don't like thinking in medical school. They memorize- that's all they want you to do. You must not think.

    Backus took a small apartment in New York, and enrolled at a radio technician's school to learn how to build a high-fidelity radio set. While there, he helped an instructor do mathematical calculations for an amplifier curve. It was boring work, but it uncovered an aptitude and interest in mathematics, and led him to enroll (again) at Columbia University to study math. By 1949, he was about to graduate with a B.S. in Mathematics. During that spring, Backus visited the IBM Computer Center on Madison Avenue, where he toured the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC), one of IBM's early electronic computers. He mentioned to the tour guide that he was looking for a job, and she encouraged him to talk to the project director; and he was hired.

    Backus spent three years working on the SSEC, during which time he invented a program called Speedcoding. This was the first program to include a scaling factor which allowed both large and small numbers to be easily stored and manipulated. In late 1953, Backus wrote a memo to his boss that outlined the design of a programming language for IBM's new computer, the 704. However, the inefficient computer programs of the time would hamper the 704's performance, and Backus wanted to design not only a better language, but one that would be easier and faster for programmers to use when working with the machine. IBM approved Backus's proposal, and he hired a team of programmers and mathematicians to work with him. The challenge Backus and his team faced wasn't designing the language, which they felt they could easily do. Instead, it was coming up with a device that would translate that language into something the machine could understand. This device, known as a translator, would eliminate the laborious hand-coding that was programming at the time. It contained an element known as a parser, which identified the various components of the program and translated them from a high-level language (one that people understand) into the binary language of the computer.

    In the fall of 1954, Backus and his team felt strongly enough about their research to publish a paper called "Preliminary Report, Specifications for the IBM Mathematical FORmula TRANslating System, FORTRAN). At the time, he anticipated completion of the compiler in 6 months; instead, it took 2 years. When completed, the compiler consisted of 25,000 lines of machine code, stored on magnetic tape. A copy of the program was provided with every IBM 704 installation, along with a 51-page manual. The first versions of the program were understandably buggy, but later versions would refine and eliminate them.

    FORTRAN was designed for mathematicians and scientists, and remains the pre-eminent programming language in these areas today. It allows people to work with their computers without having to understand how the machines actually work, and without having to learn the assembly language. That FORTRAN is still in use 50 years after its introduction is testimony to Backus's vision.

    After FORTRAN, Backus turned his focus to other elements of computer programming. In 1959, he developed a notation called the Backus-Naur Form, which describes grammatical rules for high-level languages and has been adapted for use in a number of languages. In the 1970's, he worked on finding better programming methods and developed what he called a function-level language, or FP (for functional programming).

   John Backus was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1976, the Turing Award in 1977, and the Draper Prize for engineering in 1993 for his work on FORTRAN. He retired from the computer industry in 1991.

REFERENCES:

http://www.digitalcentury.com/encyclo/update/backus.html

http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Backus.html