For those without someone to swoon over, perhaps a bit of technology nostalgia and a Fortran manual will do.

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What used to be the rarefied province of the Fortran-initiated is now, of course, available to anyone with a smartphone.

WSJ: We Can All Have a Slice of Pi | Postmodern Times by Eric Felten

But chances are good you haven't heard about the passing of John Backus, a computing pioneer who invented the Fortran programming language for IBM.

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Fortran was one of the first widely adopted "high level" computer languages--before those, computers had to be programmed directly in assembly language, a complicated and laborious process.

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The limits of Fortran rattled through software systems so deeply that we were all spooked about the prospect of simply flipping over the calendar on Jan. 1, 2000.

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Fortran helped popularize programming and usher in the computer age.

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But chances are good you haven't heard about the passing of John Backus, a computing pioneer who invented the Fortran programming language for IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ).

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