THE LIVING ARCHIVE

From punched cards to autonomous collaborators: the ideas, people, languages and systems that taught machines to follow—and increasingly interpret—human intent.

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Tag: ibm-701

John Backus and Speedcoding: An Interpreter on the Road to FORTRAN

Before leading FORTRAN, John Backus built Speedcoding for the IBM 701, an interpretive system that made floating-point scientific programming easier while exposing the performance cost of abstraction.

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