John Backus, 82; Created Programming Language

Before Fortran, computers had to be meticulously "hand-coded" -- programmed in the raw strings of digits that triggered actions inside the machine. Fortran was a "high-level" programming language because it abstracted that work -- it let programmers enter commands in a more intuitive system, which the computer would translate into machine code on its own. The breakthrough earned Mr. Backus the 1977 Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery, one of the industry's highest accolades. The citation praised his "profound, influential, and lasting contributions." Mr. Backus also won a National Medal of Science in 1975 and the 1993 Charles Stark Draper Prize, the top honor from the National Academy of Engineering. "Much of my work has come from being lazy," Mr. Backus told Think, the IBM employee magazine, in 1979.