Backus began his career at IBM purely by happenstance. In 1950, just after graduating with a master’s degree in mathematics from Columbia University, he wandered into IBM’s headquarters on New York’s Madison Avenue, where the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC) — a room-sized electromechanical computer — was on display. Backus mentioned his interest in mathematics to a tour guide and was promptly given an informal oral exam consisting of math brainteasers. He aced the test and was hired on the spot as a programmer, even though he had little idea what programming was.
At IBM, Backus readily applied talents that weren’t always apparent during his academic career — an extraordinary gift for problem-solving, including finding ways to break down those problems into more manageable forms and, above all, a willingness to fail in the pursuit of knowledge. In 1953, frustrated by the complexity and high cost of programming, he assembled a small team at IBM to come up with a better way.
The eclectic group included a chess wizard, a crystallographer, a cryptographer, a researcher from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the only woman on the team, Lois Haibt, who joined straight out of Vassar College and would go on to become an early pioneer in computer science.
The team tackled two fundamental problems: how to make programming faster, cheaper and more accessible to a wider range of users, and how to structure the underlying code to make all that possible. Backus managed with a light hand — he deemed IBM’s rigid yearly performance reviews ill-suited for his team, so he simply ignored the reviews process.