Here’s Backus and some contemporaries speaking informally:
Relating the 701, demonstrated to all 6 customers in 1952:
you write this program you’re going to - bam - get the result and we all sat there and said how in the world are we going to keep these machines busy… it’s so tremendously fast
via
Watching this, I noticed a woman on the team, only one I think, and that prompted me to do some digging… It’s Lois Haibt, and in the video she says
we were trying to do something that basically nobody had ever tried to do before and nobody had ever succeeded in doing that none of this theory existed nothing was known about parsing it was all invented at the time and it wasn’t a case of choosing between this method and that method and this theory and that theory there were no theories
…
it’s not everybody that starts out their working life with such a you know absolutely marvelous project
Lois Haibt recalls being “good in math and science and terrible in the fuzzy subjects like English,” while a scholarship student at Vassar College. Shortly after she graduated in 1955, IBM hired her and she was quickly assigned to the Fortran team. Like many of her fellow team members who came from disparate backgrounds, she was selected due to her success in and passion for math and science, and for her keen problem-solving skills. In an interview from 2001, she explained, “They told me it was a job programming computers. I only had a vague idea what that was. But I figured it must be something interesting and challenging if they were going to pay me all that money.” She is credited with building the arithmetic expression analyzer, the core of the Fortran compiler.
Also, on IBM’s page on the history of Fortran:
The eclectic team included a chess wizard, a crystallographer, a cryptographer, and a researcher from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lois Haibt, who joined the project straight out of the mathematics program at Vassar College and was the only woman on the team, recalled, “No one was worried about seeming stupid or possessive of his or her code. We were all just learning together.”
From that page, a photo of the team:
A still from the video:
