(1954) The Birth of High-Level Code: FORTRAN’s First Run

On September 20, 1954, programmer Harlan Herrick ran the first program written in FORTRAN on an IBM 704 mainframe, quietly igniting the modern software era. Before that day, programming meant wrestling directly with raw hardware—a grueling, error-prone chore of manipulating binary switches and manual assembly mnemonics. John Backus and his team dared to suggest that computers, not humans, should handle the tedious translation from human-readable mathematical notation into machine code.

Skeptics dismissed high-level languages as wildly inefficient, convinced that no compiler could rival the artisanal precision of a human hand-coder. They were wrong. FORTRAN’s success shattered that myth, democratizing computing and redefining software development as an art of scalable logic rather than mechanical manipulation. Every modern language—from Python to Rust—traces its lineage back to this first triumphant compile.