Fortran was invented by a team of programmers working for IBM in the early
nineteen-fifties. This group, led by John Backus, produced the first compiler, for an
IBM 704 computer, in 1957. They used the name Fortran because one of their
principal aims was "formula translation". But Fortran was in fact one of the very
first high-level language: it came complete with control structures and facilities for
input/output. Fortran became popular quite rapidly and compilers were
soon produced for other IBM machines. Before long other manufacturers
were forced to design Fortran compilers for their own hardware. By 1963 all
the major manufacturers had joined in and there were dozens of different
Fortran compilers in existence, many of them rather more powerful than the
original.
All this resulted in a chaos of incompatible dialects. Some order was restored in
1966 when an American national standard was defined for Fortran. This was the first
time that a standard had ever been produced for a computer programming language.
Although it was very valuable, it hardly checked the growth of the language. Quite
deliberately the Fortran66 standard only specified a set of language features which
had to be present: it did not prevent other features being added. As time went on
these extensions proliferated and the need for a further standardization exercise
became apparent. This eventually resulted in the current version of the language:
Fortran77.
