For those who are a little older.... John Backus, who lead the team that developed FORTRAN passed away last week. FORTRAN was originally developed for the IBM 704 and is regarded as one of the first high-level programming languages. He was involved in the development of ALGOL 58 and ALGOL 60. ALGOL was the first language that I learned, FORTRAN the second. Theres a good obit at NYTimes http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/19/obituaries/20cnd-backus.html?ex=1332043200&en=adde3ee5a1875330&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink Its worth reading. Slashdot also has heaps, including.... FORTRAN was the first working high level compiler language; BASIC was the first working interpreter language. Very different underlying structures. Now COBOL was the second major high level compiler language, and it was very much a reaction to FORTRAN, so I suppose using parent post's logic, we can blame Backus for COBOL. But then that cheapens the contributions of the Girl Admiral (Grace Hopper) who gave us such wonders as the nanosecond wire, and MULTIPLY 2 BY 2 GIVING FOUR. For the youngsters out there: FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator) was the break-through from machine language and assembly to a higher level language with a compiler. Everything we do now is based on this; I believe that many mission critical engineering libraries are still in Fortran (they were a few years ago) COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language, Compiles Only By Odd Luck) was the second successful high level language. Its major improvement over Fortran was getting rid of triphasic logic (branch on <0, or =0, or >0) in favor of boolean logic (branch on !0 or 0). Its most noteworthy failing was the requirement to use the period punctuation mark (full stop) to end sections. This was particularly a problem for girl programmers, since at the time getting into trouble because you missed a period had serious consequences. Cobol simply put too much emphasis on a nearly invisible and easily missed period. BASIC (Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) made two big advances: first, it attempted to span both engineering and business computing (doing each with the same degree of imprecision); second and more important, it introduced the concept of using an interpreter rather than a compiler. Good stuff, that. Yet another baby step toward tomorrow's virtual machines. Most noteworthy program ever written in Basic: Eliza. Most significant long term contribution: the reaction to its spaghetti coding style, from which Pascal and modern procedure based programming arose. </drivel> Rich off for a scotch and to read a few punched cards......