Each of the 15 or so members of the original FORTRAN project were brought together in 1982 by IBM and each was given a large ($25,000) bonus for their work 25 years earlier. Button is a legitimate FORTRAN do group. At Santa Teresa I 1982, Cuthbert Hurd (who was John Backus' manager at the time the first FORTRAN was being built) said that the two major technological events in 1957 were IBM's FORTRAN compiler and the launch of the Russian Sputnik I.
