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Fortran is a programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. Developed by IBM between 1953 and 1957 at their campus in San Jose, California, Fortran was the first program that converted an algorithm into machine language that the computer could read and execute. It was revolutionary and made programming much easier than the generating of machine language by hand. Its name is erived from FORmula TRANslation.

Computer historians have described Fortran as the software equivalent of the transistor. Kenneth Thompson, who created the Unix operating system at Bell Laboratories in 1969, observed that "95 percent of the people who programmed in the early years would never have done it without FORTRAN. It was a massive step." Or, as James Gray, a leading software researcher who now works for Microsoft, declared with a biblical flourish, "In the beginning, there was Fortran."

Fortran came to dominate engineering and scientific programming early on and has been in continual use for over half a century in computationally intensive areas such as numerical weather prediction, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, computational physics, computational chemistry, and many others. It is one of the most popular languages in the area of high-performance computing and is the language used for programs that benchmark and rank the world's fastest supercomputers.

Fortran went through many revisions over the years. FORTRAN II came out in 1958, FORTRAN III followed also in 1958 and FORTRAN IV was released in 1962. FORTRAN IV was renamed FORTRAN 66 when it became an ANSI standard in 1966. The next major update came in 1978 with FORTRAN 77. This is the version that has been used for the last 20 or so years and is still used by the hard-core programmers.Fortran 90 was released as an ANSI Standard in 1992. This was a major revision that added many new features to reflect the significant changes in programming practice that had evolved since the the introduction of FORTRAN 77. Fortran 95 was a minor update that was released in 1997. It offered a few new features and made obsolete those awkward options that 90 was attempting to phase out. The most recent standard, Fortran 2003, is a major revision that introduces many new features including object oriented programming support.