The papers of John Warner Backus (1924-2007) span the years 1951-2001, with the bulk of the material dating from 1953 to 1991. They relate primarily to his work as a computer scientist at IBM from 1950 to 1991 where he developed FORTRAN, the first commercially successful high-level programming language. Documents in the Backus Papers are arranged in numerical order according to a system prepared by Backus. His item list containing descriptive comments about individual items or groups of items is located at the beginning of the collection. Another copy is appended to this register.

Included in the collection are correspondence, memoranda, reports, papers, speeches and lectures, notes, articles, manuals, and historical retrospectives relating to Backus’s activities as a pioneer in computer programming. Items from the early years include notes on his work with IBM’s Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator, a 1954 preliminary report on specifications for FORTRAN, early programming manuals, correspondence with the first FORTRAN customers, photographs from a meeting of the committee working on the international algebraic language ALGOL, and a paper from 1959 in which Backus proposed what later became the Backus-Naur Form (BNF) used to describe grammatical rules for high-level programming languages.

From 1963 until his retirement in 1991 Backus held the position of IBM Fellow and pursued his own research projects relating to mathematical theories of programming and the development of functional programming languages. This work is documented in annual reports, internal project papers, texts of lectures, and photographs of calculations on blackboards. Also included are files documenting Backus’s political activism as a member of Computer Professionals Against ABM (anti-ballistic missile system) in the early 1970s and as an opponent of the strategic defense initiative in the 1980s.