The name FORTRAN is derived from Formula Translating System, Formula Translator, Formula Translation, or Formulaic Translation. The names of earlier versions of the language through FORTRAN 77 were

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In late 1953, John W. Backus submitted a proposal to his superiors at IBM to develop a more practical alternative to assembly language for programming their IBM 704 mainframe computer. Backus' historic FORTRAN team consisted of programmers Richard

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FORTRAN II
IBM's FORTRAN II appeared in 1958. The main enhancement was to support procedural programmingby

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A full description of the Fortran language features brought by Fortran 95 is covered in the related article, Fortran 95 language features. The language versions defined by later standards are

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Although a 1968 journal article by the authors of BASICalready described FORTRAN as "old-fashioned", programs have been written in

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Portabilitywas a problem in the early days because there was no agreed upon standard—not even IBM's reference manual—and computer companies vied to differentiate their offerings from others by providing incompatible features. Standards have improved

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The language defined by the twenty-first century standards, in particular because of its incorporation of Object-oriented programming support and subsequently Coarray Fortran,

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