A passing

John W. Backus, RIP.

John W. Backus, who assembled and led the I.B.M. team that created Fortran, the first widely used programming language, which helped open the door to modern computing, died on Saturday at his home in Ashland, Ore. He was 82.

Ah, yes. I well remember those days of the IBM-1620 (it had about one one-millionth the computing power of my current laptop -- took a weekend to run a two independent variable, one hundred observation multiple regression -- and filled an entire room together with peripherals like the card reader, the card punch, the line printer, etc.) and Fortran-II.

A different era.