On This Day - 19th April

The first FORTRAN program written outside IBM's own development team is run at the Westinghouse-Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

FORTRAN — short for FORmula TRANslation — had been developed by an IBM team led by John Backus for the IBM 704. It was designed to allow scientists and engineers to write programs using mathematical expressions rather than having to write lengthy sequences of machine instructions.

The first FORTRAN compiler was a major step towards high-level programming languages. Instead of writing instructions specifically for the hardware, programmers could describe calculations in a form much closer to the mathematics of the problem. The compiler would then translate the program into machine code.

On 19 April 1957, the first documented customer-written FORTRAN program was run at Westinghouse-Bettis. The initial attempt produced an error message caused by a missing comma, but a successful run followed.

FORTRAN went on to become one of the most influential programming languages in computing history. It was particularly important in scientific and engineering computing and demonstrated that a high-level language could produce efficient machine code.

The language is still in use today, more than six decades after its introduction.

Sinclair Research announced that it had sold one million home computers worldwide, claiming to be the first company to reach that milestone. The total comprised around 130,000 ZX80s, 750,000 ZX81s and 200,000 ZX Spectrums. Sinclair also estimated that a further 600,000 Sinclair computers had been manufactured under licence by Timex for the North American market. The company said production in Dundee had reached approximately one computer every four seconds.

ECC Publications launched Timex/Sinclair User, a new magazine aimed at owners of Timex/Sinclair computers in the United States. Based on the format of Britain's Sinclair User, the magazine covered reviews, projects, books and programming, with a first print run of 100,000 copies. ECC estimated that around 750,000 Timex/Sinclair machines were already in the United States and expected that figure to reach two million within a year.