Fortran Archive Collection

The Fortran archive is a collection of items, primarily documents, relating to the early years of the development of the programming language Fortran, 1954 to 1964. Fortran (an acronym derived from The IBM Mathematical Formula Translating System) was the first successful high-level programming language and the first high-quality optimizing compiler. It was originally developed at IBM for their 704 mainframe computer by a team led by John W. Backus beginning in late 1953.