1954On September 20, 1954, the first FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslation) program was successfully executed by IBM scientists on an IBM 704 mainframe computer. FORTRAN, developed by a team of IBM scientists led by John Backus, was the first high-level programming language designed for scientific and engineering applications. It allowed programmers to write complex mathematical calculations in a more intuitive and efficient way, using formulas that resembled standard mathematical notation. FORTRAN quickly became a popular language for scientific computing and is still used today, albeit in updated forms. Its development paved the way for the development of other high-level programming languages, which have since become essential tools in computer science and software engineering.