I'm sure you've met the kind of person who is smart, articulate, a bit manipulative, and has no direction for their life other than to break as many rules as they can get away with while engaging in dissipative behaviors.

That was John Backus, the inventor of Fortran ... until he saw his first computer in the Spring of 1949. At that point the direction of his life was set with a passion that had evaded his first two and a half decades.

That computer was an electromechanical beast named the SSEC (Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator) at IBM headquarters. It executed sequences of instructions on paper tape. It had no ability to branch or jump around within the program. Loops were constructed by taping the ends of the paper tape together into an actual loop.

At one point the operators looped a tape but inadvertently put a half twist in, turning it into a Möbius strip. It took them a very long time to figure out why the program behaved so oddly.