Dead Celebrity Alert

John W. Backus, who assembled and led the I.B.M. team that created Fortran, the first widely used programming language, which helped open the door to modern computing, died on Saturday at his home in Ashland, Ore. He was 82.

His daughter Karen Backus announced the death, saying the family did not know the cause, other than age.

Fortran, released in 1957, was “the turning point” in computer software, much as the microprocessor was a giant step forward in hardware, according to J. A. N. Lee, a leading computer historian.

Fortran changed the terms of communication between humans and computers, moving up a level to a language that was more comprehensible by humans. So Fortran, in computing vernacular, is considered the first successful higher-level language.

Mr. Backus and his youthful team, then all in their 20s and 30s, devised a programming language that resembled a combination of English shorthand and algebra. Fortran, short for Formula Translator, was very similar to the algebraic formulas that scientists and engineers used in their daily work. … Read full obituary

PC World lost a treasured colleague and friend Tuesday, when Senior Technical Editor Rex Farrance was killed during a home-invasion robbery attempt. For 19 years, Rex served PC World with professionalism and a passion for accuracy. …

As news of the attack spread on Wednesday, current and former coworkers, as well as colleagues in the technology industry, shared their shock and grief. …

Rex was an expert on data storage technologies, but covered many products and services throughout his tenure at PC World.

He was also a dapper dresser who earned the nickname “Mr. Savile Row” around the office for the suits and sport jackets he wore, no matter how casual workplace attire became over the years. He always attached an American flag pin to his lapel. “He was a real gentleman,” added McLeod. … Read full obituary

Paul A. Flaherty, a computer engineer who helped create the pioneering AltaVista online search engine, has died. He was 42.

Flaherty died March 16 of a heart attack at his home in Belmont, about 20 miles south of San Francisco, family members said Friday.

Flaherty came up with the idea of indexing Web pages that made the AltaVista search engine one of the most popular Internet search tools in the mid-1990s. …

Flaherty was working as a research engineer at Digital Equipment Corp. in Palo Alto when he teamed up with two other staff researchers in 1995 to develop AltaVista’s technology.

The Web site was made public in December 1995 and within weeks was processing several million searches a day. It was spun off from Digital Equipment as a private company in 1999. … Read full obituary

Jim Seymour, an early and influential technical writer who explained the benefits and headaches of personal computers for two decades in enthusiasts’ periodicals like PC Week and PC Magazine, died on Tuesday in Austin, Tex., where he lived. He was 60.

The cause was complications from gall bladder surgery, said his wife, Nora.

Like most people pulled into the personal computer industry in the early years, Mr. Seymour was a self-taught expert. A native Texan, Rogers James Seymour graduated from the University of Texas, then worked for a few years as a jazz musician and freelance photographer for magazines like Life and Time. …

It was Mr. Seymour who introduced a young Michael Dell, who began his direct-mail computer company in his University of Texas dormitory room, to Lee Walker, who became Dell Computer’s first president. …

Mr. Seymour was also the founding editor in chief of PC Computing magazine in 1988… Read full obituary

Kristen Nygaard, a pioneer in developing programming language for computers who helped lay the basis for the Internet, has died of a heart attack, aged 75.

Nygaard died yesterday in Norway’s capital, Oslo, according to media reports.

The University of Oslo professor was acclaimed internationally for his work in developing the programming language Simula that laid the basis for MS-DOS and the Internet.

He and his colleague Ole-Johan Dahl, who died in June, were presented the 2001 AM Turing Award and other prizes for their role in the invention of object-oriented programming at the Norwegian Computing Centre from 1961 to 1967. … Read full obituary

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Gene Kan, one of the pioneers of the file-sharing technology called Gnutella that took music swapping beyond the realm of Napster, was found dead of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound, a coroner’s spokeswoman said Tuesday. He was 25.

Sue Turner of the San Mateo County medical examiner’s office said Kan’s body was found July 2 at his Belmont home. …

A statement released Monday by his employer, Sun Microsystems Inc., said Kan died as the result of an accident and that no further details of his death were being released at the request of his family. …

Gnutella came along as Shawn Fanning’s Napster program became mired in lawsuits by the recording industry. Kan and a small clutch of developers honed the Gnutella protocol so that programmers around the world could make their own home-brewed computer applications — each speaking the same language and capable of pointing users to shared music, video and software files. … Read full obituary